iriver's $40 T5 USB stick-style audio player unboxed and reviewed

iriver's T5 was launched and forgotten in one fell swoop, but with a starting price of under $40 for the 2GB edition, it's at least worth a look, right? Critics over at Pocketables were able to secure one of the USB stick-styled devices for review, and they even bothered to host up a plethora of unboxing / hands-on shots for those keenly interested. Size wise, the unit is just marginally smaller than your average USB WWAN modem, and while the minuscule OLED display wasn't much to look at, it sure trumped those screen-less rivals. Under pressure, the stick delivered "surprisingly good sound quality," and while the device overall didn't bring anything fantastically fresh to the table, the inbuilt USB jack, integrated display and excellent audio capabilities made it a pretty good option for the gym. 'Course, there are formidable alternatives out there (Sansa Clip, anyone?), so we'd recommend giving the linked review a closer look before breaking out the plastic.

[strider_mt2k @ Dec 29th 2008 8:56AM]

Yes please, more little 2GB players.

Because you couldn't build a castle out of the ones floating around already.

[OneLove @ Dec 29th 2008 11:41AM]

iriver is the asus of media player companies, they seem to release a new one every week.

[temitayo @ Dec 29th 2008 8:59AM]

2GB!!!!!.. are you kidding', this is 2008 son!

[Mobius_1 @ Dec 29th 2008 9:32AM]

Most irrelevant and ireverent (sorry, iRrelevant and iReverent) use of 300 movie line ever.

[Biomech @ Dec 29th 2008 9:52AM]

thanx Techy.

[Bad Beaver @ Dec 29th 2008 10:02AM]

If this industry wasn't just about milking you yearly for just another clip-on, I would highly welcome a good player that allowed for you to bring your own micro-sd.

[dcoaster @ Dec 29th 2008 10:06AM]

Sansa Clip is the best small MP3 player out there.

[ASEVENSEE4 @ Dec 29th 2008 10:33AM]

The capacity is way too small regardless of the price.. seriously.

[Arkenklo @ Dec 29th 2008 11:28AM]

Not for $2. I'd totally buy one of those for $2.

[htd @ Dec 29th 2008 10:45AM]

too little, too expensive.

[JB MacHine @ Dec 29th 2008 11:11AM]

Reminds me of something a co-worker and I came up with: Digital music for tape players. We designed a digital music player into a cassette tape body. Open the cassette tape, remove the tape, add an mp3 decoder and memory. Add a small battery or power cable to connect to the cigarette lighter. Now someone driving a 30 year old clunker in the African bush can take 1,000 songs with them and play them on the cassette player. We planned to sell millions of these to the third world.

Then we did the patent research and discovered that in the early 2000's Philips pattented use of digital music with an analog tape player.

That's okay, the exercise in creativity was a great deal of fun.

To mirror the comments above, I agree, the proliferation of so many mp3 players has made them pretty boring...

[Arkenklo @ Dec 29th 2008 11:29AM]

And tape exists nowhere but the third world?

[JB MacHine @ Dec 29th 2008 11:42AM]

Part of the point was to offer an extremely inexpensive method of playing digital music to those who otherwise could not afford it.

What is your status? Where do you live, are you middle class? Would you have bought this device rather than connecting a portable CD/MP3 player to your car? Most cars, at least here in America, have had CD players by default for a long time now. So I would not think that there would be a big market, at least here, for this digital music cassette...

[Electromodo @ Dec 29th 2008 12:46PM]

My friend bought the MP3 cassette you are talking about back in 2002.

The device was similar to the one on picture: http://dvice.com/pics/standalone_or_car_cassette_mp3_player.jpg
It did have an SD card slot too.

That player did not become popular. Even my friend used it for a couple of times and forgot about it. The device could be used as an iPod shuffle, but the weird form factor and bad randomization killed it.

[Endeavour @ Dec 29th 2008 11:34AM]

nice packaging

[madflame991 @ Dec 29th 2008 11:40AM]

Wow, brilliant design! It looks completely the same as the Samsung YPU3 [http://www.oled-display.info/images/samsung_ypu3.jpg]
The only difference is that the samsung has been on the market for some years... and it's better.

[RioRyan @ Dec 29th 2008 11:54AM]

More proof that Apple's hardware is ridiculously overpriced. 2GB Shuffle - $70, and the shuffle doesn't even have a screen!

[Honda @ Dec 31st 2008 6:50PM]

May not be a good news to gadget friends but I believe iriver is now moving to the right direction. Source did say that they are selling a lot of e100. Battery life seems to be very good with the OLED screen.

But I guess i'll pay a bit extra for the iRiver T6
https://www.warehouse123.com/ProductInfo.php?pid=IRIT6-BLK