The Lplayer from iriver will seem familiar to some people. At first glance, it looks like a smaller iriver Clix. The two players use the same D*click technology—the company's term for its innovative, practically button-free design. You navigate the good-looking interface by pressing down on the sides and corners of the tiny player's screen. The Lplayer comes in 4GB ($109.99 list) and 8GB ($159.99) capacities—with lower price tags than both the iPod nano and the Clix. One thing missing from the Lplayer is the Clix's excellent support for Rhapsody, but for the price, the player offers solid file support wrapped in a good-looking package.

The 2.36-by-1.69-by-0.51-inch (HWD), 1.45-ounce Lplayer is truly diminutive. The nano is thinner, but the two devices' screens are identical in size and resolution (2 inches, 320 by 240 pixels), and both are easily pocketable. If you want a small device for occasional on-the-go video watching, it'll do just fine. The only trick is figuring out how to hold the Lplayer so you don't block the screen, which occupies almost the entire front surface. Also, using the lock switch on the rear panel is essential, so that you don't accidentally click the screen and pause or fast-forward, for example. The player's only true buttons, for volume and power, reside on the side panel. There's a mic for voice recording, a lanyard hole, and a mini USB port for syncing with your PC's music and video library.

File support for the Lplayer is laudable. There's no AAC support, but you get MP3, WMA, and for the music snobs and lossless junkies, OGG and FLAC. Video support is limited to WMV9 SP, Xvid SP, and MPEG-4 SP. You'll need the video converter (software that's on the included CD, along with the manual) to load other types of files onto the Lplayer. My results with the video conversion software were mixed. A WMV HD video loaded without a problem, but its aspect ratio was off. A full-length film in Xvid format, on the other hand, converted perfectly and looked just fine on the tiny-but-bright screen. Photo support is better than you get on most players: JPEG, BMP, PNG, and GIF.

For the most part, navigating the user interface is simple. Menu options are organized well, and though the click system occasionally requires a second push in order to select an item, it's generally a pleasant way to move around the user interface. My main problem with the UI is that some options and settings are hard to find and require extensive poking around or reading the manual to locate. Accessing the music settings, including EQ customization, for instance, requires holding down the entire screen for a few seconds. It's not exactly intuitive. The same menu lets you deactivate the annoying fade-in feature, so you'll want to know where to find it. But once you get oriented, you're golden, so my quarrel with the interface is minor.

Audio quality through the bundled earbuds is seriously poor, but once you swap in a pair of earphones with a better fit and some low end, like Ultimate Ears' Super.fi 4, the player sounds great. The bass boost on the customizable EQ is noticeable, pleasant, and doesn't distort. The FM radio and recorder works well, with 20 presets that are easy to tune and save. The voice recorder is equally straightforward but is located, oddly, under Recordings in the main menu—a section whose name implies that it will house your recorded files, not the actual tool that creates them. (Recorded files can be found under submenus in the FM and Music sections.)

iriver rates battery life at 12 hours of playback for music, which is fairly weak for a flash-based player these days (iPods last about twice as long), but we were able to eke out 16 hours 27 minutes.

So, what's the Lplayer got that the nano doesn't? For starters: a lower price. Then there's FM radio and recording, plus voice recording. My biggest issues with the Lplayer are the occasionally unresponsive click buttons and an interface that may be simple to navigate but sometimes buries the obvious stuff. All in all, however, the iriver Lplayer is a worthy nano competitor, and continues the strong legacy of the popular Clix in a more compact and less expensive package.

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