My Personal Experience with the iRiver Company

iriver is an upcoming maker of portable digital and audio devices. I am a consumer that has adequate experience dealing with iriver, as well as one of their well known products called an "H10".

The H10 was a nice device that I bought for a good sum of money at a local Best Buy. This product, the H10, also came out around the time of the very popular iPod, therefore it didn't get as much coverage as the iPod did. iriver is a brand name that, to me, seemed very helpful and dependable at first, but after some time that turned around.

One day my iriver H10 stopped operating while charging. I had heard of horror stories where some people sent their MP3 players into the company for fixing, and they got charged nearly as much as the originating MP3 cost. Just to try, I sent personally contacted iRiver via e-mail. I received an e-mail not too long after I sent mine into them.

When anyone sends them an e-mail, iriver creates an account for you to use on their website to contact their employees, which is pretty neat idea. However, I found out that this company-made inbox made contacting iriver a tedious endeavor. The website's inbox was in a separate section of a normal Internet Explorer window, so it had it's own scroll bars and arrows. On some computers I noticed that I couldn't even view my inbox.

Of course the mail inbox doesn't have much to do with the company specifically, so I digress in my personal story. After contacting iriver multiple times through their self-established account inboxes, I noticed that nothing was getting done. My final e-mail is the straw that broke the camel's back.

As I stated before, I said that I had heard horror stories of some people being charged as much, or nearly as much, for their fixed MP3 players as they originally paid for them. I sent an e-mail - my final e-mail - to iriver asking for a mere estimate of how much it would cost to fix my MP3 player. I told iriver's representatives/employees in detail what had gone wrong with the H10 previously as well. I never received an e-mail back from iriver about the estimate, nor an e-mail about any other problems I had. I tried e-mailing the company on a few occasions after that, but I never got any help. Now my MP3 player collects dust in my room.

This was, of course, my personal experience with the iriver company. The iriver product I purchased was a great product until it stopped working, and it worked for year and a half or so as well. Overall, iriver seems to have great products, but pretty low customer service skill.