Sony's NW-E003 music player uses a simple USB memory key design, where you pop off the end cover and plug it into your PC or notebook to charge the Li-Ion battery and fill the player with music. There are no cables, chargers, adapters, mess or fuss.

There's no denying the NW-E003 has buckets of style and is very compact, measuring 79 x 25 x 14mm and weighing a mere 24g. In that respect it follows in the tracks of the old Philips KEY range, which has been superseded by the SA13xx range. And just as Philips is unable to come up with a decent model name, so too does Sony let the side down.

The NW-E003 we're reviewing has 1GB of storage, the 512MB version is named NW-E002 and costs £65 while the NW-E005 has 2GB of space for £95. We don't want to pre-empt our conclusion but that 2GB player is rather good value for money.

Plugging the NW-E003 into a USB port is the easy part, while transferring music is a bit more laborious than is strictly necessary as Sony champions its ATRAC format over MP3, WMA and AAC.

This means that you have to install its SonicStage v3.4 software which will scan through your music library to create a listing called My Library. Select the music that you want by dragging it to My Device and then sit back for quite some time as the transfer progresses very, very slowly.

The ATRAC conversion can't help here, but we feel sure that the USB 1.1 interface also plays its part. On the plus side the Sony player has an enormous battery life of 28 hours. This is a feature of every ATRAC player we have ever seen so you should have enough battery life to listen to the 1GB of music twice over.

We've noted that the NW-E003 is very stylish, and in part this is thanks to the mirrored finish which hides any trace of a display. Turn the player on and the single row OLED display bursts into life, but the downside is that there is very little space for the controls.

The Play/Pause button and Mode button are sensibly located, and the rocker control for Next and Last is fine too, mounted on one edge of the player. But the Volume control and Hold switch on the back of the player are tricky to operate and suggest that the designer had run out of ideas.

Sony has come up with a small, light and stylish player that has a superb battery life, but in 1GB form it's a fairly expensive player and the process of converting music files to ATRAC format is so tedious that it is beyond a joke.