The latest crop of digital music players with micro hard drives shows just how far the MP3 player market has come. Recently-launched microdrive digital music players offer a better capacity/price ratio than their flash memory counterparts and are sturdier than conventional external hard drives players. iRiver has gone a step further with its iGP100 player, while building on its MP3 presence with an extensive range and ambition to boot.

Performance

Like many of its peers, iRiver iGP-100 uses a Cornice 1.5 GB hard drive device, which we already wrote about in our Rio Nitrus review. The drive is reasonably priced compared to the competing Hitachi models.

While the iGP-100's file transfer speed does not set the world on fire, the 35 seconds it took to copy 30 files totaling 100 MB is nothing to be ashamed of either. The boot time of five to 10 seconds is fast, as well.

We did our usual damage infliction test by dropping the device from a height of three feet onto a wooden surface. The device kept playing and recording after the crash test, and when we shook it, there were no negative effects on music playback.

The iGP's embedded lithium battery, which always comes with a recharger, offers more than10 hours of continuous music play.