Review: iRiver LPlayer MP3 Player

December 22, 2008 By Grant Clauser

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Inexpensive MP3 players are fairly plentiful these days. The iRive Lplayer is one of them, but it stands out among the crowd by being easy to use and innovative. When you first look at it you notice that it’s not just another iPod clone. For one thing,  matchbox-sized Lplayer is nearly all screen. It looks like a palm-sized digital picture frame or a Barbie LCD TV. The only visible controls are the power and volume buttons located underneath the bottom edge of the player, though on the back there’s a lock button.

Navigating content with the Lplayer is done via the clicking the edges of the 2-inch LCD screen. The company calls the interface D-click--the player's frame can actually be clicked in the direction you want to go (left/right, up/down) within the unit’s menus and catalog. It was a little confusing at first, but I got the hang of it quickly and rather like the tactile feedback of pressing the frame down and hearing a little click.

You can load the Lplayer a number of ways. The most basic it to just drag and drop files into the appropriate media folders, but that doesn’t give you a lot of control over the files. It also works with Windows Media Player or you can use the included software.

The Lplayer’s screen is bright and well organized. You can view one category at a time (music, photos, videos, radio, settings) and rotate through them by pressing the top and bottom screen edges. You then select your track, or photo etc… by clicking the right side. When listening to music, the player has a default setting that fades the tracks in and out for a half second, a feature I found that effect a little disturbing.

Music sounded on par with other major brand MP3 players, which is to say pretty good, but I’d suggest replacing the included earbuds with something better. The pair it comes with can be uncomfortable and distort at high volumes.

The digital photos I loaded onto the player looked great, better than what you find on many of the digital cameras with similar-sized or larger screens.

Video content also looked good, but watching video, especially widescreen video (which gets letterboxed on the Lplayer’s 4:3 screen, is just too difficult, at least for my eyes. Younger owners may have more tolerance than I do.

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