THE $499.99 iRiver PMC-120 is one of just three portable devices that run Microsoft’s Windows Mobile-based Portable Media Center (PMC) operating system, which lets you play and display music, video, and pictures with ease. While better than Samsung’s YH-999, iRiver’s player can’t beat out the Creative Zen Portable Media Center as our favorite of the three.

The PMC-120 is reasonably sized for a personal video player with a 3.5-inch color screen, fitting snugly between the bulky Zen and the slimmer YH-999. All PMCs share the same basic specs, including a 400MHz Intel XScale processor, 64MB of RAM, a USB 2.0 interface for synchronization, and a 320×240 screen. The current models all feature 20GB hard drives.

The PMC-120 supports native playback of MP3, WMA (including DRM-protected files),WMV, and JPEG files, but you’ll need to convert DivX files to WMV format to play them on the device. Also, the player lacks video or audio-recording capabilities.

On the plus side, the PMC OS is simple, smooth, logical, and smart, unlike the archaic interfaces seen on many non-PMC personal video players. The PMC-120 is missing a wonderful feature found on the Zen: preset bookmark buttons, which will take you to any point in a song within a playlist or to a scene in a movie. It also trails the Zen in battery life, though our test results of 13.5 hours for audio playback and 6.7 hours for video beat the YH-999’s times. Like the Zen’s, the PMC-120’s battery is removable.