iriver Booth & Wave Home
I was definitely excited to see iriver’s booth this year at CES since was by far my favorite last year- bright, modern, and fun. I would love to put the iriver booth in my home somewhere; it would be my happy place. This booth was the same as last year with a slightly different layout but it a much better location, not stuck in the corner with the car audio. I did the best I could to share this with you in the form of an HD video below. Please enjoy this along with a general recap of whats new with iriver.
What really disappoints me about iriver is that most of their products will not be for sale outside of the US and those few that are sold have very limited distribution. I discussed the availability with one of the iriver reps and they said the only brick and mortar store selling iriver products was Costcos and it is only the E100. There is a bit of good news for stateside devices- I was told that the Wave home unit will come to the states. However, I was told that last year for many of the other devices. Here is a quick video of the Home unit.
It’s a rather clever device with all kinds of media playback, various widgets, and a full VoIP / video conferencing set up. What is cool is that the W10 (Similar to the W7 minus the phone part) ties into this home unit acting as a satellite handset for the main WAVE unit. I actually was able to make a call from the Wave Home to my cellphone- funny thing was it came in as a Korean number. Just for fun I called that number back and got a very excited sounding Korean operator that I couldn’t understand- I wonder what that antidote is going to cost me. Tangent aside, I’m told that this home unit will sell for “around $300”, not bad if it ever comes to fruition.
To be honest I’m a bit frustrated with iriver for the fact that they have hands down some of the best looking devices on the market- their designs are truly top notch. But, what’s frustrating is that they don’t do too much for the US, so we never get to experience their products. Though you can’t really blame them since the market for high end media players is limited in the US, especially recently. If you want to check out an example a great looking device and UI take a look at this P7 HD video I took at the booth.
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