When first turning the Forge Sport on you are presented with a big Rio logo and as seen above it lights up blue, this lasts for about 4 seconds which by that time the player mode comes on the LCD. As you can see as well you have a red light behind the main control buttons which is nicely designed. Hear we have Play/pause, Stop, Forward/Reverse and the centre button which in menu mode you press to select an option and then to the left you have the menu button. All these buttons have a nice feel to them and your thumb glides over them with ease.

After the initial start-up, you can see all the info on the LCD: Across the top, Volume level, repeat player function, lock indicator and power bar. In addition, if you have ID tags they will scroll along the LCD. Under this you have the track position bar, track time, track number and then play indicator as seen above. But if you press the centre button the LCD will change what it displays i.e. time view, date view and track format view which is quite handy at times. All these functions are really easy to use and you will have no problem getting to know how to use your Forge in no time. I would also like to mention that when you do change an option in menu mode the forge displays a big tick or cross on the LCD to let you know that the setting has changed. This is excellent on a sport minded player as whether your rock climbing, mounting biking, in the gym or having a jog it would be hard to look for a little settings saved.

Moving on to the menu mode, which has been set out brilliantly and again, is easy to navigate. Firstly, we have play music, in here, you have 10 options to choose from: Album, Genre, ect, basically you tell your Rio how you want it to play your music. Then to bookmarks which are great for specific player settings like track order and time. Then moving on to settings, in here we have again 10 options to choose from like playback, display, language, FM tuner but my favourite is the Equalizer. The Forge can be fully customizable to suite your own taste is it bass or more treble you want? Next in the list is the FM tuner, most mp3 players come with this option built in so no surprises here but I did find that the frequency didn’t tune in very well, this would be my only complaint about the player. Then finally last in the list is the stopwatch, as I’ve said earlier the Forge is designed for people who like to play hard hence the name Sport so they’ve included this function to time yourself over laps while you’re listening to your music.

Rio has included some Sport clip headphones with this package, again really good for on the run and general exercising. I found them a bit tricky to put on but once you have them comfortable in your ear they won’t come out what ever you doing. I tested these doing running, cycling and playing football with no problems what so ever. I found the sound was no different from every other quality headphones on the market these days, but they do get top marks for design.

Moving on to the Carrying case Rio has supplied, this works really well and is again designed perfectly to fit the Forge Sport. This accessory is designed to clip onto the Armband which straps onto your arm but I’m sure you could slide it onto your jeans or what not. The Armband itself made from a stretchy elastic material so it fit's all sizes with a Velcro strip on the end to secure in place. Rio have put a lot of effort into this design to get it right and in my opinion they have hands down, you can almost forget that the player is strapped to your arm while working out, but you are always aware as the music is playing hard in your ears.

Rio has given all you need on the installation CD including their software. It called Rio Music Manager and it an all-in-one solution that can Rip, encode and manage your entire music collection and I found it easy to use. With this software you can easy transfer music to your Rio and edit your IDE tags and create custom Playlists all from one place but the one function I did really enjoy was the Rio DJ wizard. With this function you can either select the tracks yourself or you can let the DJ decide for you and it will come up with a playlist for you to transfer over which is great if your sitting there wondering what tunes to put on to your Rio let the DJ decide. This is connected and run through the included USB cable.

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