Creative offers its flash memory Zen Nano Plus music player in three capacities (256MB, 512MB and 1GB) and a choice of colours including black and white, however we reckon our white 512MB sample was more like an off-grey. This is just one of many factors that ensure you will never confuse the Zen Nano Plus with the all-conquering iPod Shuffle.

The Zen Nano Plus is small and squat, measuring 66 x 34 x 13mm, and its 34g weight is relatively high because it includes a 12g AAA disposable battery which has a claimed life of up to 18 hours. Depending on your point of view, this either means that you never have the hassle of waiting for your Zen Nano Plus to recharge (nor the worry that the battery will die permanently) or it means that you face a lifetime of feeding batteries into the thing. You could use rechargeable AAAs, of course.

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Significantly, the Zen Nano Plus has a two-row mono display that shows track information, time and the remaining battery life which is clearly intended to help you take control of the player. However, the function buttons really don't help in this regard. Take, for instance, the jog control, which can either work as a Fast Forward/Fast Reverse or you can change it to Next Track/Previous Track. Unfortunately you have to enter the Settings screen to change from one mode to the other which is awfully laborious.

While we're on the subject of modes it came as a surprise to find that you have to select Play mode to listen to music, just in case you have the FM radio turned on or want to monkey around with your EQ setting. In short the Zen Nano Plus couldn't function without the LCD screen as you otherwise wouldn't have a clue what it was doing.

So the controls are confusing and a bit illogical but loading the player with music couldn't be easier. Well that's true provided you plug it in (using the supplied USB cable) and then drag and drop your MP3 and WMA files in Windows Explorer. The USB 2.0 interface is fast and there's no messing around. Creative also supplies a second cable in the package so you can connect a device to the line-in port and then can encode directly to MP3 within the player.

The alternative music loading method sees you install Creative's MediaSource software, as well as Creative Zen Nano Plus Media Explorer, MSN Music and AudibleManager. Once you've completed that task you can plug in the Zen Nano Plus and use Creative's website to check that you've got all the latest versions, just like you do with your X-Fi sound card.

Except that in our case the Auto-update feature didn't detect that Creative had new firmware available for the Nano Plus, so we manually downloaded and installed it and then we installed a hefty 52MB update for MediaSource.

Frankly, we found the Creative software to be a complete waste of time unless you make use of the auto-fit function which converts your music to WMA and juggles the bit rate to make the most of the available storage space. If you do that you'll find it's a reasonable tool but it's also the epitome of bloatware.

Creative has a track record of making cheap WMA players that are also very effective. The Zen Nano Plus lives up to that tradition, however we feel that Creative has tried to jam in too many functions at the expense of simplicity, and that makes the iPod Shuffle a very tempting buy as it only costs £10 more.