Performance & Measurements

Once you've juiced up the little rocker, which takes about 4 hours, it's time to roll. We filled ours up with 1145 songs, about 1/2 of the 20 GB disk. I noticed that with 1145 songs, it took the H320 17 seconds to start up. Obviously, we are not using the DB function. It may seem slow, but some people are reporting upwards of 5 minutes using the DB function! While we observed nothing like that behavior, it is noticeably annoying even at 17 seconds.

Performance

For battery life tests, the H320 was set on shuffle 'all', volume set to 20, with a 32 Ohm load. The songs on the player are a large variety of 128kbps to 320kbps CBR and VBR (q=0, LAME) MP3's, as well as a few OGG (500kbps) and WMA (128kbps).  My apologies to MisticJeff

11:30 : Started, set play parameters, and left alone.

17:00 : Check-up 4-bars of battery, screen stayed on for 20 seconds.

20:03 : Check-up 3-bars of battery, 20 second backlight timer. Late because I had to watch the Hawaii 5-O intro

24:00 : Check-up 1 bar, this is the 12.5 hour mark!

00:38 : Check-up still 1 bar, I'm getting tired.

01:30 : 0-bars, maybe another hour?

02:30 : 0-bars, blinking and beeping.  It really wanted you to know that it was out of battery.

03:13 : fina..Zzzzzz.

The H320 lasted for more than 15 hours of continuous use. 15 hours is very impressive. People will most likely use the screen for much, much longer, which will significantly shorten battery life. On one particular trip from San Francisco to LA and back again by car, the iRiver went 9 hours, including about 2 hours from the day before, providing us with constant music for the entire drive. On average, you can expect yourself to be oblivious to the outside world for at least 11 hours.  That's not too shabby, now is it?

File Transfer speeds were quite fast. We used the incredibly precise method of drag and drop, then used a clock to time when the file copy window disappeared. A 73.2MB album folder took about 7 seconds. A 731MB folder full of pictures took 1m 44sec to transfer.  It certainly never felt like it was slow. Syncing with WMP10 is substantially slower, being that the media port is still USB 1.1. Transferring a 38.9MB album folder took nearly 3 minutes!  I nearly bugged out of my skull in waiting!