Customer Reviews:
 Definitely the one to get. January 24, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
My Gen2 8GB Clix is only a few days old, but I like it quite a lot.
First impressions: It's tiny. The pictures you see of it online don't do it justice. Once you get it in your hands... the thing is small. If you want a light, compact MP3 player, the Clix is perfect. And since it is flash based (solid-state memory) in addition to being small, it's a great player for people who are working out or are constantly on the go.
The player face is very sleek. The screen is crisp. It's not very big, of course, but the player as a whole is smaller than a credit card. Navigating the player is very intuitive. A couple of the lesser-used options might take some figuring out, but they're very easy to access once you figure out how in a minute or two.
There's a programmable smart button which you can program to do a variety of different tasks when you push it. Currently, I have it return to the home menu. Definitely a nice feature to help navigate an already easy menu system.
The D-Click system they use is great. The face plate serves as four directional buttons (up/down/left/right) and there's no labels cluttering the face. As you move through the menu system, different icons will appear on the four sides of the screen which relate to the four buttons around the face. Just press the side of the face plate in that corresponds with the icon you want. After a few minutes, you begin to memorize the menus and can then rapidly click through the menus to get to where you want to be. Also, several different screens have additional menus if you hold down one of the sides. For example... holding "left" down while on the song-playback screen will bring up a variety of music playback options.
There's five buttons around the spine of the player. Two for volume, one for power, a smart button (the programmable one), and a hold slider. There's labels for these buttons on the back of device which is somewhat annoying at first. However, you'll remember the location of these buttons in a few hours and will be thankful that the labels are on the back of the device and not on the front.
I'm a fan of the rating system on the Clix. Since getting my music on the device, I've been assigning ratings to most every song (0 - 5 stars). This allows you to instantly generate a playlist based on rating. You can have the Clix play songs that are rated X stars or higher. So, if you want to listen to your favorite songs, you can have it create a playlist of 4 stars or higher, and it will play all 4 and 5 star rated songs. This allows you to create a variety of playback options. For example, if you only want to listen to some really good songs, set the playlist to 4 or 5 stars. If you want access to a larger variety of songs, then set it to 3 or 2. It also has your typical by artist, by album, and by genere playback abilities.
There's so much more I could say about it, but those are the biggest points in my experience thus far. I've been getting a decent battery life on a full charge (about two days of near-constant useage when not sleeping or driving).
One word of warning, however: if you are thinking about picking up the cradle... don't. The cradle only offers one very weak external speaker in addition to what the Clix can already do. Charging through the cradle is still done through your computer. The only thing that seems neat about the cradle is that it makes for a nice stand while the Clix charges (whoopdidoo?) The cradle only set me back twenty Washington's.
So... definitely get a Clix Gen2 8GB player... and definitely skip getting the cradle.
Great sound, and small January 23, 2008
If you are looking for small, very nice looking, mp3 player, which can display pictures, has a great sound quality and a large capacity then this mp3 player is made for you. I absolutely love it.
There are two drawbacks I should mention:
- like every other mp3 player you will buy the free headphones are of horrible quality, which is an even bigger problem for this mp3 player as it has such good sound quality
- it is quite sometime to fill 8GB, at the same time 8GB might not be quite large enough to contain your entire collection. Thus you might want to consider a larger capacity (one that can fit your entire collection) if switching file quickly is important to you
 Buy This Player January 23, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I've bought a lot of music players in the past but Iriver with their 8GB Clix has finally gotten it right. Whether your running, working out or sitting on a plane or bus, this is a tough, compact little player packed with a bunch of great features. Without question the most unique is the D Click operating system. Functional, intuitive, and simple to use, navigation through the menus (once you learn it) can be accomplished without really having to look at the screen....speaking of which is vibrant and can even be viewed in direct sunlight. A couple of quick notes. Know up front that the included ear buds are junk and DO NOT do the sound quality of this player justice. Buy some decent quality (less than a 100 bucks) sound isolating earbuds. I'm using a pair of Ultimate Ears Super.fi 3's and the sound is phenomenal especially on the SRS WOW setting...and I listen to everything from Allison Krause to Jimi Hendrix. Also spend a few bucks and buy a decent silicone skin/arm band as you'll need it when your moving and the high gloss finish attracts fingerprints. Overall this is an excellant player for the person on the move, who wants to carry a decent amount of music and video, and who requires great sound quality and reliable performance.
This thing is awesome! January 22, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I love this thing. I couldn't get the iRiver software to recognize the device, can you believe that? When I tried windows media player 11, it kept freezing up will sync-ing so I got pretty frustrated. Windows media player would put incomplete files on the Clix and they cause the unit to freeze.
I deleted everything, and just dragged and dropped my albums into the music folder on the clix and that worked great. In order to have album art however, you must use one of those two aforementioned programs, but I don't care about that. I was also able to get the iRiver movie converter to work and put the entire movie "The Life of Brain" on my Clix (it only takes up about 1 gig of space).
That's all I need from this device. IRiver's software used to not allow the downloading of copyrighted material from their MP3 players to computers in an effort to appease the RIA, but they have abandoned that idea on the clix. You can freely move files onto the clix and off again to any computer, making this unit far superior to the IPOD, even if I can't get the album art thing to work!
Since the Clix doesn't have a hard drive in it like the IPOD, it will never skip so it is better than an IPOD for the car and the gym. I got mine for about [...]...what a steal! Look out IPOD, iRiver is turning up the heat.
Solid player January 20, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
I read great things about this player on CNet and it largely lives up to expectations. Sound is great, and it has a lot of fun features and a beautiful screen for video (even if small). My only complaint is that battery life is not what I had hoped - expected less than the 20+ hours advertised but I am actually getting less than 10 hours per charge. Not much warning when it goes - started a gym workout with one bar on the battery indicator and it was completely dead within 20 minutes.
The click interface takes some getting used to and you may have to use the hold button to avoid accidental clicks when in use, but I like it better than a scroll wheel.
Other than the battery and some minor irks, this is a very high quality player and I am happy with my purchase.
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