Digital Trends

iRiver SlimX iMP-550

October 20th, 2003 | by Dan Gaul

Introduction

iRiver is at it again. In the past they have continually put out great products, earning great praise from Designtechnica for their SlimX 350 and SlimX 400 line. It's easy to say that the SlimX 550 not only includes the excellent features of the previous models, but it builds on them in an impressive way. Touting what they claim to be the thinnest CD/MP3 Player with the longest battery life, the SlimX 550 is packed with great features, great build quality and ease of use.

Features

To keep up with the popular hard drive based MP3 players such as Apple's iPod and Nomad's Zen, the CD based MP3 players must be more robust in features while keeping a low price point. The iRiver SlimX 550 does both extremely well. Gone are the days of bulky CD players. The SlimX 550 is a mere 13.7mm thin. To put that into perspective, that's thinner than a DVD case. The circumference of the SlimX 550 is barely larger than the CD itself. It can fit into the front pocket of a backpack or even cargo pants/shorts pockets easily. With the weight coming in around 145 grams, carrying it around is barely noticeable.

The SlimX 550 utilizes a wired control, which has a comforting light blue back light. The four line LCD screen supports graphics such as 3 visualizations, up to 39 languages (including French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese.) and ID3 v1 through v3 track information.

The firmware can be upgraded to support new features and possibly new codecs. A quick check of the iRiver site shows that a new firmware version is available along with Caption Editor. Caption Editor is a tool that allows the addition of lyrics to songs along with time syncs for when each line of the lyrics are displayed.  This allows viewing of lyrics while playing the files back on the SlimX 550. 

Folder and M3U support are available including shuffle play within a single folder, all folders or skip folders completely, and shuffle based off the order the files have been written to the disk (saves at least an hour of battery life.)

WMA and ASF files are also supported for playback including traditional RedBook Audio CDs. Let's keep crossing our fingers that Ogg Vorbis will eventually be added as a supported codec through a firmware update. The anti-shock is especially good of up to 32 minutes.

Overall, the FM Tuner works well. The control device appears to act as the antenna, giving decent reception. It could pick up most local stations with a strong signal and while maintaining excellent sound. The SlimX 550 supports up to 20 presets for the radio and there is also an auto-scan feature.  However, the auto-scan did not seem to work that great in the tests, picking up some dead stations and not picking up stronger signals near the upper end of the spectrum.

A pleasant surprise is that the iRiver SlimX 550 package comes with everything needed for use in the car. This includes a cassette adapter and power adapter. Sound performance will differ depending on the car's audio system. But using the stock Bose system that came with the Mercedes Benz it was tested in, the audio sounded great.

Also included in the iRiver SlimX 550 package are two rechargeable NiMH batteries, an external battery pack (which allows up to 55 hours of playback time when used with the internal batteries!), a carrying case, an AC power adapter, a headphone adapter, and an extremely well written manual.