iRiver eschews market trends, treads on with iRiver B30 multimedia player

I know we’ve said it multiple times, but we’ll say it once more for those who may have missed it: Smartphones are hot. Because of that, dedicated media players such as iRiver, iPods, Zunes etc. are seeing decreased sales as people look to consolidate all of their needs to one gadget. iRiver pushes on however with their latest media player, the iRiver B30. By now, you can expect fairly average specs from a player in this category — 2.8″ 280 x 320 display, WOW earphones, and an integrated DMB Tuner. As far as supported formats go, back in the day of my iRiver iHP-120, practically any and every format including OGG (and FLAC if Rockbox’d) were officially supported. As media players have proliferated, with the masses only using a few popular formats such as MP3, AAC, WMA and WAV, support for many of those more obscure, niche formats has unfortunately been dropped. Supported video formats include MP4, DivX, XviD and H.264.

Storing all of your digital collection can be done with either an 8GB model or higher capacity 16GB version. Thankfully iRiver allows end users to further expand their libraries via microSD card as 8GB and 16GB just isn’t what it used to be. Rolling back to that DMB tuner, if you happen to live in a country that supports the technology, take comfort in knowing that mobile TV is but a few button presses away. Sadly here in the states the technology just hasn’t quite caught on.

To rehash, since smartphones are gaining ground so quickly these days, do dedicated media players such as the iRiver B30 have much draw for you? Or are you looking on to bigger and better things?

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