Hey folks, Valkor here with the first of many post CES
reviews. Stepping up to bat first is Iriver and their flash Mplayer, with a
Walt Disney, Mickey Mouse motif. And I have to say the Mplayer is the cutest
MP3 player to enter the Val-cave.
I mean it’s really cute, just check out the pic and see for yourself. It’s small, fits right in the palm of your hand, or just as easily in your top pocket. The Mplayer’s direct competition is the IPod shuffle as it has no screen, and minimal controls. You get a power button, 1 ear does the previous/next for skipping through your tunes, and the other controls the volume. Of course you have a headphone jack between the ears and a usb 2.0 port at the bottom. It’s simple, effective and looks good when it’s hanging from your neck (necklace strap included). Total storage on the device is 1gig, which is good. You can get a good chunk of music on their.
The Mplayer looks great, but how does it sound? It sounds amazingly well for such a tiny player. Music sounds as good you encode them (or how you buy them encoded). And loading the songs has multiple options. The easiest I found was syncing it with Windows Media Player, but you can also drag and drop or copy and paste, whichever you prefer.
I took the opportunity to take the Mplayer out and get some reaction. I showed it off to 20 people without telling them what it was and the first reaction response I got was “What is it?” Once I told them all thought it was damn cute, more for women than for guys but hey they do have it in black and you can keep it in your pocket. So the Iriver Mplayer, Mickey edition has survived Val-cave testing with flying colors. It’s simple to use and looks good too. I’m giving it an overall score of 4. The Iriver Mplayer has been Valkor tested and TOV approved.