iRiver PMP-140 Portable Audio / Video Player, anything better?

Big.Wayne · 5 Mar 2006 at 22:33

Hiya,

I have owned an iRiver IHP-140 (audio player) for a year and a half and it has worked well but as always maybe its time to upgrade.

Just been offered an iRiver PMP-140, 40GB audio/video player and picture viewer

Just spent an hour reading several web reviews on the PMP-140, everything seems pretty decent, plays DivX and XviD videos, MP3 and other audio codecs (Ogg WMA?) 5 hour battery life for video, 10 hours for audio. It has a USBv2.0 connection to the PC and a USBv1.1 Host USB port (for plugging in a digital camera etc, would have prefered a USBv2.0 host though!). The killer feature for me is the on-the-fly direct-MP3-encoding!

iRiver don't have any mention of the PMP-140 on their website anymore? not sure why? is it that old? Instead they have a model called the PMC-140 which doesn't appear to be as good as the older PMP-140?

Had a quick look at the U10 but 1GB/2GB is simply not enough storage space.

Wondered what the competition is to this player for around £220?

Any of you guys own or used one of these, or can recommend something similar I would be interested to hear what you have to say

[edit] just saw the Apple iPod Video 60GB MP3 Player (£299.04 inc)

any good?

Siders77 · 5 Mar 2006 at 22:44

I have the 30GB iPod and it's pretty good. The battery life isn't all that good. I can watch a whole film and listen to an hour or so of music if I'm lucky

But apparently the 60GB has a lot better battery.

Also the screen stratches really easily.

Vegetarian · 6 Mar 2006 at 13:29

Rockbox your iriver and stick with that - has better sound quallity than new stuff. Do you really need to watch films on the go?

Alex_L · 6 Mar 2006 at 16:04

the cowon A2 : http://www.dapreview.net/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.239

archos av500 i've seen get quite good reviews,

both are portable media players, but are likely to be nearer 300 quid.

Personally i'd stick with a music player at the moment, as personal media players are still in the early stages in my opinion.

Big.Wayne · 6 Mar 2006 at 17:35

thanks for the replies. Just remembered a friend has a PMP-140 so I gave him a quick call to see if I could loan it for a day or so, sadly its been sent back to iRiver in germany for repair. something to do with it not turning on properly?. The worrying thing is this is the second unit he had, the first one did the exact same thing. . .

Think I'll sit this round out!