iriver showcased an interesting portable media player at the Consumer Electronics Show known as the W10. I’ve reproduced here in part a story I wrote on this player earlier in the year on what features it looks like it will have, but it’s interesting to note an announcement made yesterday about the W10. iriver is apparently partnering with Nanoradio AB, a Swedish semiconductor supplier, to supply the W10 with with a low power Wi-Fi chipset which offers 802.11b/g wireless functionality.

iriver said in this announcement the W10 will “be launched to consumers in the US during the third quarter of this year and then to operators in Europe and Korea.” This device, for those that don’t know much about it, is a tablet style portable media player with a thickness of 14mm. It has built-in wireless Wi-Fi technology and location technology to serve as a GPS style device without actually using GPS technology. A Wi-Fi positioning system developed by a company named Skyhook Wireless will have “location awareness” to help consumers accurately determine their location via an on-screen map by detecting Wi-Fi access points in range and comparing them against a database of geo-located points. Loaded into the iriver w10 to compliment this feature is a mobile search guide with points of interest such as banks, ATMs and tourist destinations as well as more in depth information on hotels, restaurants and shopping.

Joining this location based technology on the iriver w10 is a host of more standard portable media player features such as a 3-inch widescreen LCD display with touchscreen controls, 1GB of onboard memory which is expandable via a Mini SD memory card slot, VoIP support for Internet based phone calls, a built-in speaker, integrated FM tuner, a voice recorder and support for media file types such as MPEG, MP3 and WMA. Also included is podcast management software for downloading and updating subscribed to podcasts.

One additional announced feature that looks to be built into the w10 (and recently confirmed to me by iriver) is the ability to download music over the Wi-Fi airwaves from the RealNetworks Rhapsody digital music service. This feature looks to let one automatically refresh with new personalized music selections from Rhapsody’s catalog as well as allowing users to rate and save songs to their Rhapsody library, flag songs for later purchase and access Rhapsody’s editorial content, all while on the go. Additionally, the w10 will reportedly ship preloaded with music from hundreds of the world’s most popular artists on EMI Music, SONYBMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group, as well as leading independent labels.

iriver has plans for a range of products based on the W10 platform and will be launching more models later this year and in 2008.