iRiver Spinn

The hardware and internals of a SPINN

The Spinn is fully made of metal[4] and features a resistive touchscreen AMOLED display along with an analogue wheel knob. Both the screen and the wheel have haptic feedback.[4]

The Spinn has sound customisability in the SRS WOW HD 3D, as was seen previously on the iRiver Lplayer.[4] Some features have been carried over including a voice recorder and Flash Lite games, but the Spinn also has Bluetooth.[4] iRiver officially rates a 25 hour battery life for audio, or 5 hours for video.[4]

In some regions such as the UK, it came with a DAB radio tuner.[3]

It supports the audio formats MP3, WMA, Ogg, APE, ASF and FLAC, and videos in the formats MPEG 4 Simple Profile and WMV.[4]

The iRiver Spinn's distinct feature is its user operability. It has a modern user interface that can be both operated by both the touchscreen or the physical analogue spindle,[4][5] which is officially called the SPINN System (Analog Toggle Wheel).[5] The wheel lets the user navigate left and right, and it can be clicked to select.[6]

Trusted Reviews thought that the Spinn was "excellent and innovative", but that it could be niche in the market.[5] The Register commented that it provides good sound quality as with previous iRiver players, but that it lacks in the video department and that the UI is "half-baked".[4] The CNET review (with a score of 7 out of 10) liked the build quality, interface and support for audio codecs, but criticised the high price and the lack of certain features for the price.[7] Engadget liked the "beautiful" hardware design, the display and the wheel, but did not like the high price and the software.[8] In What Hi-Fi?'s review, the Spinn's design was praised but otherwise commented that for listening to music other products were better.[9]

In South Korea, the Spinn failed to generate enough sales to recover against its rivals, Cowon and Samsung. IRiver did release another U device in 2011, the U100.[10]