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With every new MP3 player that arrives in the office, the previous one we reviewed starts to look old, over priced and less capacious. The iRiver iFP-799 is yet another example of this, as it has no less than 1GB of flash memory and a price per megabyte which seems much more appealing than the previous flash based players we’ve had in the office.

OK, the iFP-799 might not have an OLED display, nor is it as small as some of the other players we have tested, but part of this is due to the fact that it uses a single AA battery as its power source, which adds to both size and weight. To be honest, I didn’t think much of the iFP-799 when I removed it from the box, it felt cheap and tacky and the purple and silver colour combination didn’t really appeal.

But once I had put some music on it, plugged in a pair of decent headphones and fiddled around with the equalizer settings, it really grew on me. To be frank, this is the best sounding MP3 player I have ever tested. Now, you might think that I’m rushing into conclusions here, but the sound quality is just amazing and I can’t think of a single portable device that I have ever used that sounds better.

The iFP-799 is far from perfect though, as it is quite fiddly to use until you become familiar with the various controls. The main controller is a stubby joystick that controls the volume and skipping forward and backward between the tracks. The joystick can also be depressed, a short press takes you to a list of the tracks playing and a long press takes you into the menu system.

There are a further three buttons that are used for controlling the player, three on the top, which consists of a power/play/stop button, a repeat/equalizer button and finally a record/mode button. At the bottom of the player is a key lock switch, which for once is large and easy to use.

There is of course a headphone socket, but as the iFP-799 supports direct encoding there is also a line-in port. To the left of the display is an integrated microphone and at the bottom of the player is a standard mini USB 2.0 port behind a small sliding cover.

So having covered the basics of the player, let’s take a closer look at what you can do with it, apart from listening to MP3, WMA, ASF and OGG files. iRiver claims no less than 40 hours playback time on a single alkaline AA battery, which seems about right considering that having used it for about two hours a day for a week, the battery meter on the player still hadn’t gone down from four bars.

Even if you don’t have a PC, the iRiver iFP-799 is still something that you could consider buying, as long as you’re not worried about naming your tracks, as it features direct encoding. This is however limited by the 3.5mm line-in socket, so you won’t get very good quality rips, but if you’re desperate, at least you’ve got the option.

You can of course also use the direct encoding to record from the built in FM radio, but again the sound quality will be dependant on the original transmission. The line-in socket can also be switched over to act as a microphone socket in one of the menus, in case you’d rather use an external mic than the integrated one.

The integrated mic does however offer very good recording quality as long as the ambient noise isn’t too high. The downside is that the iFP-799 records to a proprietary .rec format, but these files can be converted to MP3 in the iRiver manager software. You can play them back on the player, so it can act as a Dictaphone with massive storage capacity.

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