Iriver

History

In 1999, Duk-Jun Yang and Rae-Hwan Lee left Samsung Electronics, along with five colleagues. They formed ReignCom, with Yang as CEO, originally as a semiconductor distributor, then decided to capitalize on the growing MP3 player market. They decided to outsource manufacturing to AV Chaseway, located in Shenzhen, China, and contract product design to INNO Design, an industrial design company in Palo Alto, California, while keeping R&D in-house.

The company's first iriver product was the iMP-100, a portable CD player capable of decoding MP3 data files on CDs, released in November 2000. It and a later model, the iMP-250, were rebranded and sold by SonicBlue in the United States under the Rio Volt name. Iriver sold later models with its own SlimX brand, billing them as the thinnest MP3 CD players in the world, before jumping to other types of players. The company rose to the No. 1 position in the global market, before being displaced by the iPod's introduction.

In 2002, iriver scrambled to develop its first flash memory player to meet demand from the U.S. Best Buy chain. A year later, it was first to market with 512 MB and 1 GB players, and completed its IPO at KOSDAQ, a Korean stock exchange. By that time, the company was also selling hard drive players to compete with the iPod. It also used adult film star Jenna Jameson and an Audrey Hepburn lookalike as spokesmodels promoting its products.

iriver adopted a new marketing strategy in 2005, attempting to grab mindshare from Apple. It referred to the U10 flash player as the thumb thing. This referred to users controlling their MP3 devices with their thumbs, just as they do their cell phones and text messaging devices. The company also announced plans for digital audio players featuring Internet telephony.

iriver's U.S. unit, based in Vancouver, Washington, held 3.4% of the U.S. MP3 player market in 2005, according to IDC. The company targeted early adopters among American users as it tried to regain dominance of the category. It also opened sales divisions in Brazil, Germany, Hong Kong and Japan.

ReignCom announced in May 2006 that it would adjust its focus toward hand-held mobile gaming. It has also reported sluggish sales for its music player business, including a loss of 35.58 billion won (US$36.68 million) in 2005, compared with a net profit of 43.46 billion won in 2004. ReignCom also owns the Korean-language Yurion and Funcake entertainment services.

In its South Korean home market, iriver once accounted for 50% of sales and the company has bought ads claiming its products are a symbol of patriotism. It also operates a small chain of iriver Zone stores, with locations in Korea, Japan, and China. The Incheon International Airport shop features a large heart-shaped art piece, which represents the corporate "Heartbeat Philosophy" of "dedication to its customers".

In May 2007, Reigncom announced a new division, Reigncom USA, to manage the iriver brand in the United States and help develop new products. The company also bought the Siren brand in Japan from A-MAX Japan, despite protests from Siren Inc. itself.

The dominance of Apple’s iPod and iPhone, the decline of MP3 players and the rise of smartphones have challenged iriver’s business. In 2006, the company had sales of 149.5 billion won and an operating loss of 54.4 billion won. The next year, Vogo Fund bought a large stake in iriver, which reported 5.5 billion won in profits on 206.8 billion won of sales. Deep losses followed in 2009 and 2010.

Product features

iriver's current products can all play MP3 and WMA audio files. Some units support text viewing, Ogg Vorbis audio files, Macromedia Flash, and/or BMP files. The company also supports Microsoft PlaysForSure, which allows recent products to support subscription-based music download services, including URGE, Napster, Rhapsody, and Yahoo! Music Unlimited. It also lets users disable its DRM functionality.

A nearly unique feature of the newer iriver players is the direct MP3-recording capability with selectable bitrate of internal (FM, microphone) and external (line) sources.

Many players support multilingual display in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. They support Winamp playlists and allow repeat, shuffle play and programmable functions. Several preset and one user-defined EQ settings are included, plus a built-in FM tuner.

Most iriver players include a unique feature called study mode. Users can quickly jump back and forth within tracks by a certain time interval, set from three to 180 seconds in current models. The option was designed to help people listening to recorded language lessons. SonicBlue removed this feature from its Rio Volt models, causing some users to hack their players with iriver firmware from other regions.

Wing

iRiver Wing introduced at Consumer Electronics Show January 2008. (photos).

Portable music players

iriver makes hard drive, flash and portable media players. All hard drive and flash players play WMA, MP3, and OGG files and have FM tuners unless stated otherwise.

Discontinued

Current

Discontinued

European customers should be aware that several models are missing the FM radio functionality available in other world markets.

Iriver initially dropped UMS support for the U10, T30, T20 and T10 models in favor of Microsoft's MTP. The company later released an official Firmare Updater that allows users to switch between the MTP and UMS interfaces (for some models except 256 MB and 2 GB ones). The updater will only connect to the player from Windows XP SP1 or above.

Although the T10 2 GB version distributed in the US and Canada does not officially support such firmware, the European version does. There is currently ongoing discussion on the misticriver forums to port this firmware for use on the US version.

Current

Discontinued

The U10 and Clix can also play Flash Lite 1.1 games in the .swf format.

Ebook Readers

Korea-only electronic dictionary player