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The Engadget Interview: iriver America President Jonathan Sasse
We recently had the chance to sit down with iriver America President Jonathan Sasse, who gave us an refreshingly candid take on the company's recently relaunched clix portable media player, its close relationship with MTV's new URGE music download service, and the uphill struggle to increase share in a market dominated by the iPod:Thanks for sitting down with me this afternoon. There's a lot to talk about, but the big news is that iriver just re-launched the U10 as the clix and announced a relationship with URGE, MTV's new music download service. Could you give us an overview of both the launch and the relationship with URGE, and how it came about? The launch is going well and the response has been great. Obviously there's been a lot of great reviews. The interesting thing with the clix is that it's a lot more than a new name for the U10. I've noticed some improvements in the UI. Yeah, the UI's been changed a lot. The hardware's actually different, too. We upgraded the processor, and obviously the memory and the price are different, too. It all goes back to late last year. Microsoft came to us and let us know that they we're going to do a new version of Windows Media Player that's gonna be dramatically different than Windows Media Player 10 in a much more visual way and from an experience standpoint. They also said that they would have a new service partner, though they didn't say who at the time. They said, "We've got somebody that's pretty big and can make a big impact in this space and we'd like to bring you guys on board to help be a great device on that system." They knew the service had to be really good, but at the end of the day they couldn't just have a smattering of devices that they just grabbed any type of device and plugged it in and said, "There you go."
