Matt Van Stone

I have been riding the train a lot lately and I am really growing sick of sitting there in silence. Since I had to give up the iPod that was never really mine when I left my last job I have been MP3 playerless. I purchased a RAZR V3i for it’s music capability, but the DAP on the phone really sucks. It is very picky about bitrates of MP3s and it has failed reading most of the songs I have put on it. Plus the sound quality really blows.

I have recently become addicted to reading Engadget and Gizmodo. These sites fuel some kind of sick addiction that people have with you guessed it, gadgets. The sites give the world up to the minute news on all sorts of fresh gadgets as well as specs, rumors, and reviews.

The Sansa Connect player has been on the headlines a lot over the past few weeks. It is a new wifi player that allows you to stream internet radio from Yahoo Launch right to the player from wherever there is an open wifi signal. Although I wasn’t interested in paying the premium for wifi, the regular Sansa e280 (8GB) looked pretty good to me. It’s the same price roughly as a 4GB Nano (if you find the Sansa on sale) and it supports FM Radio, voice and FM recording, and even does video playback. Plus the screen is bigger. This player looks nice, but then I found the iRiver Clix2.

Here’s a video of the Clix2 functioning.


And here are the rest of the videos in that set. The third video shows a size comparison against the original Clix from iRiver.
iRiver Clix2 – The GUI – Part 1
iRiver Clix2 – The Gui – Part 3
iRiver Clix 2 – A Quick Overview

I can see only two issues with the Clix2. The first being the user input. I like the idea of a buttonless interface, but I don’t like how you have to press above the display to move the cursor up. I think it would have been better if pressing the middle moved left or right and pressing the corners moved up or down. The second thing being the fact that there is no expansion slot for additional memory. A lot of players are including MicroSD slots to allow for up to 2GB of memory to be added. For this reason I would defiantly want to wait until June when the 8GB version of this player comes out.

Some other players I like include the Sansa e280 and iRiver X20. The iRiver X20 would actually be my first choice, but “its so thick” (reference: Milhouse and the pure syrup squishy) for a flash based player.