This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: The iRiver iHP-140 Feed Title: Michael Lucas-Smith Feed URL: http://www.michaellucassmith.com/site.atom Feed Description: Smalltalk and my misinterpretations of life Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Michael Lucas-Smith

This is the baby I just bought. It's still in transit and in theory it will be in the store tomorrow. If it's not, there's a chance I may not be able to take it to America :(. Hopefully it'll be there!

Why did I buy an iRiver instead of an iPod? Well, to put it simply here's the list of differences that appealed to me:

• Longer battery life
• You can replace the battery yourself
• You can replace the harddrive yourself with any toshiba laptop hard drive
• It supports the formats I use: MP3 and OGG
• When plugged in as a USB device it acts as a USB hard drive; you can put any files on there you want.
• It has an FM tuner built in
• It has built-in voice recording and compression (iRiver has been a dictaphone company for a long time)
• The display has 8-lines of backlit LCD. The remote has four lines of backlit LCD.
• It has optical input and output
• It costs about the same as an iPod of the same size

So why would you bother buying an iPod? Well, firstly, the Mini-iPod has hit a market sweet spot. The 4 gig size is exactly what the majority of people are looking for. Also, the user interface is dumbed down as all Mac interfaces are to provide the optimal user experience. I'm a power user and expect power features - the iRiver delivers.

If I get the iRiver tomorrow (fingers crossed!) before I fly out, then I'm going to be approaching the speakers at the ends of their talks and asking if I can put the recording up on the website. If I can, then to accompany my blog there will be some audio recordings. Here's hoping that I get it in time and that the recording quality from its built-in mic works well.