Peter Williams

iAudio F1

Rating: 4 out 5

I got an iAudo F1 for Christmas and I am very pleased. It has all the features I want in a digital audio player, it is small, it plays Vorbis (OGG) natively, it plays MP3 natively and it is compatiable with Linux. As it turns out the iAudio series are about the only players on the market that have all these features, which is a little sad, but you only need one choice if it is a good one.

Linux Compatiability

The F1 works perfectly on linux. Just plug it in and mount it like any other USB flash driveIt is a vfat filesystem which Ubuntu mounts automatically by default. and then use move, copy and delete files from it just like you would any other drive on your system. I have no idea why all USB digital music players don’t support this interface, it cannot be that hard to implement.

Sound Quality

The F1 supports a variety of formats (MP3, WMA, OGG, ASF and WAV to be exact). I have only tried OGG and MP3So far this is only been used for two podcasts. BTW, if you know of any good technical podcasts let me know. I am not quite sure how one finds good podcasts. With blogs I use the links from blogs I already read to grow my reading list but with podcasts it does not seem to work the same way. but they both sound quite good to my ear. The OGG playback on the F1 is notably better than the playback I get from my laptop.

The F1 has a significant set of audio effect it can apply. Everything from boosting base tones to adding missing harmonics. The all seem to do approximately what is claimed. The only effect I have had trouble with is the “BBE” effect, which is suppose to make the music sound “more vivid”. When it is turned on, and it is on by default, it completely jacks up any repeating high pitched sound, like cymbals. That is not a big deal, it just took me a little while to figure out which effect was causing the problem.

Style and Usability

The F1 has a very nice OLED screen with interesting analog dials to display where in the track you are and the volume of each channel. The gauge displays are very easy to understand and and a bit unusual, which is nice. The stuff below the analog parts of the display is fairly small and hard to read except in near optimal situations. However, I rarely find that I care about that information so it does not really bother me.

The overall shape of the F1 makes it comfortable to hold and operate. It is about the size of a pack of Trident gum, only a little thicker at one end. The only issue I have with the physical design is that your hand covers the screen if you try to operate the F1 with only one hand, but that probably comes with the territory for players this small. You can easily hold the player with one hand and operate the joystick with the other, which allows easy viewing of the screen.

The buttons don’t all work exactly like I think they shouldFor example, I think the play button should play all the contents of the selected folder but it navigate into the folder. but over all the user interface is quite usable.

USB Plug

The only other downside to the F1 is the USB plug. The USB plug is actually a separate adapter. The F1 has two jacks on it, one for headphones and one for the USB adapter. However both jacks are identical in size. The manual stats that you should “never insert the USB adapter into the headphone jack”. I am not sure what would happen if you plugged the USB adapter into the headphone jack and into a computer but I suspect that would not be pretty. The fact that the USB and headphone jacks are the same size strikes me as an accident waiting to happen. In addition, it is inconvenient to have to carry two things around rather than just one. But so far I have had no real problems.

Conclusion

Overall I think the iAudio F1 is a great little digital audio player. It looks and sounds good and has a great feature set. It has a few problems but none of those problems are huge or detract significantly from the daily enjoyment I get from this player.

Review by Peter Williams, February 2006