Review: Iriver Clix2 portable media player

It’s not often that you come across anything particularly surprising in the mp3 market - once you’ve reviewed a certain number of devices from a range of manufacturers you start to notice trends in terms of value, performance and features.

Iriver isn’t particularly well known for sitting up there with the big boys, despite producing some appealing offerings in the past, but in the Clix2 it has truly surpassed itself by producing one of the best players we’ve seen in recent times.

The front of this slimline device is almost totally taken up by the 2.2in display, which may cause those who haven’t seen the original Clix, released earlier this year, to wonder how you find your way around. As a quick refresher, the Clix2 uses a four-way depressible display for navigation, meaning you simply press down on the corresponding edge of the device to move around the menus.

Despite being a little sceptical at first, we found this method to be extremely effective. You will find additional volume, power and hotkey buttons subtly integrated into the edges, along with the obvious inclusion of a hold button to stop it browsing around at random when in your pocket.

Starting the device up reveals the first of many great things we have to say about the Clix2, namely the excellent active matrix OLED display. The bright, vibrant and superbly sharp screen does a great job of either showing off your photos via the built-in browser or video files encoded using the Iriver Plus 3 software provided. A 2.2in display is about the minimum size required to genuinely enjoy video content on a portable player, although you'll find it hard to settle into a feature film.

In addition to photo and video support, you’ll find a built in recordable FM radio and, of course, an mp3 player, which brings us to the next big selling point. Audio quality is superb, which in no small part down to the wide range of enhancements and effects you can apply. We'd recommend picking up some decent in-ear bud ‘phones to use with the Clix2 as the ones supplied are adequate, but don’t come close to reaching its potential.

On top of all this you’ll find a wide range of additional features including an alarm clock, voice recorder, text viewer and a range of flash games that utilise the unique controls of the Clix2 to good effect. It’s also extremely customisable, as well as changing the background to any of the preloaded photos or one from an uploaded collection, you can change the theme, including the menu structure, operation and choice of fonts, to produce some extremely stylish and unique effects.

It’s very difficult to think of many features the Clix2 lacks. We did notice that video encoding does take a surprisingly long time via the supplied software, and while you can transfer music and photos via drag and drop you’re better off using Iriver Plus 3 to standardise your collection. It’s also a little short on playlist control, and you won’t find the traditional artist/album/genre selection for tunes, but this shouldn’t cause too many problems.

Despite these minor drawbacks, we were extremely impressed with the Clix2. A very reasonable price tag of just £139 and 4GB capacity means it’s slightly more expensive than Apple's equivalent Nano (which has incidentally been through a number of price drops since its initial release) but the features and performance of the Clix2 means its leagues ahead of Apple’s baby.

The Clix2 is available from Advanced MP3 Players in the UK.