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I used to be really interested in the iRivers as well - when I thought my Karma had died, I decided to check them out, and I found out some things that made me rethink! (These are all in relation to the H100 and H300 series, since that's what I looked at)
For one thing, apparently you can't play music by artist or album unless you install some special database software that increases the boot time of the device. I'm not sure by how much, but something to keep in mind.
Also, apparently it doesn't read track information from the ID3/Ogg tags, so if you want your albums to play in order, you have to rename them (!?). I'm not sure if this is fixed by that database software or not, but it confused and alarmed me...
And then the straw that broke the camel's back, for me - shuffle is apparently really broken. First, there's something about shuffling and folder depth - if you have mismatched folder depths, shuffling won't work on all your files, only some of them. And then, even worse - the shuffle is not a true random shuffle. It uses a premade list of numbers. So if you listen to, say, all your songs on shuffle, then start it again, you'll hear the exact same songs in the same order. Which for me was a deal-breaker.
Also, apparently the International support is a lot better than the US support - they have new firmware releases a lot more often than the US, and get better features. They also have apparently just dropped support for the H100 and H300 series players, because they're coming out with the H10 player.
So anyway, buyer beware. Despite a higher-than-average HDD failure rate, I've decided to stick with Rio Karma, because it has the best feature set for music players out there.
Bingle
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