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iRiver P7 has a beautiful futuristic look that can woo any gizmo freak. But can its performance match the stunning looks?

Specifics:

Screen: 4.3 inch touchscreen with 480 Χ 272 resolution.

Storage: 8GB and 16GB.

Audio Formats: mp3, wma, aac, flac, ogg, wav.

Video Formats: wmv, mpeg-4, divx, xvid, vob, 3gp, flv.

The P7 is one of the prettiest and most beautifully designed PMP you can find in the market today. The P7 is 4.5 inches long, 3 inches tall and 0.5 inch thick. The P7 is fairly big and heavy with an aluminium body. It has physical controls for power, menu and volume. The interface layout is very much like that of a magazine. You can find several boxes on the main menu screen. Each box has a different player function embedded into it. For e.g. there is a box for videos, a box for music and so on. But once you are inside the sub-menus the magazine view gives way to the more commonplace list view. Unfortunately the interface is unresponsive and suffers from split-second lag. Scrolling through the list is painful as the graphical scrollbar is pretty thin. The photo viewer is sluggish and difficult to scroll through. The physical volume controls are pretty difficult to locate as they sink into the aluminium and are tiny .

The audio quality is pretty good. The P7 supports MP3, WMA, FLAC, WAV, and OGG file formats, along with album artwork and lyrics. Interestingly you cannot play the AAC format ( Music purchased from iTunes has AAC format). The songs can be sorted according to the ID3 tag (artist,album,genre). There are pretty good in-built equalizer settings in the player. One can create his own equalizer settings as well. There are some SRS WOW enhancement settings also.

The video quality is marred by a few glitches during motion. But otherwise the videos are smooth and crisp.

The screen viewing angle is not very great. Other features include FM radio and text reader. Voice recording capabilities are nothing to write home about. There is no Wi-Fi and bluetooth so shoo away dreams of a wireless headset, music downloads or You Tube.

The iRiver P7 gives you 35 hrs of audio playback and 7.5 hrs of video playback. The included software includes a movie converter that you can use to convert movie files to compatible formats.

Conclusion:

Overall the iRiver P7 is a gorgeous looking device with pretty good music and video quality. Its an all-round performer but it is let down by its sluggish and not-so-user-friendly interface. Laggy touchscreen and bulkiness also might put off prospective buyers.

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