iRiver L Player 4GB

The basics

The iRiver L Player is essentially a multimedia player. It only consists of a high resolution display. There are no knobs or buttons that can be seen on this device. It can play music, videos, photos and even open up documents. It also has an FM tuner. It comes in 4GB storage capacity.

The good

This is iRiver's latest attempt at overthrowing Apple's iPod nano. So does it succeed? Well, in part. Some of its features put Apple’s player to shame: it comes with an FM radio, voice recorder and a text reader compatible with .txt files. The performance isn't bad either. Music is the L player's chief talent and it succeeds in delivering clear, detailed sound. But…

The bad

…You're not going to beat the iPod nano with something that's got all the charm of George W Bush. It looks boring and uses iRiver's Clix system to navigate the menus, which would be okay if it always worked. But in our test, it didn’t. We've also got issues with the TFT LCD 4:3 screen - it’s not suited to video, and leaves images looking washed out.

The bottom line

The L player never really threatened the new iPod nano. But for any Apple-phobes or fans of lossless FLAC music (if there are such people), this is a decent alternative.