When someone's innovative enough to come up with a new spin on a product in a market as saturated as MP3 players, it's usually not long before a flurry of rivals follow suit. But this hasn't really been the case with the iPod Shuffle, the micro-sized, low-capacity, screen-less player that's aimed at people who put portability at a premium.

Creative has now released the first significant rival, in the shape of the Zen Stone, retaining the design ethos from its successful V/V+ series of players in a choice of six different colours.

As expected, it's extremely small and light, similar in dimensions to the Shuffle, has 1GB capacity and sacrifices an LCD display to achieve its diminutive size. Our initial reaction is that Creative could perhaps have made it even smaller - the device feels quite hollow and weighs even less than you'd think - but at this point we're wondering how small such a product could be before it becomes unusable (and very easy to lose!).

A simple directional pad forms the bulk of controls on the front of the player, allowing you to adjust volume, skip and browse tracks and play and pause. Interestingly you're given an extra bit of control over your music to make up for the lack of a display: a top-mounted slider switch allows you to skip through your collection one album at a time, or alternatively enable a shuffle mode to randomise your playlist.

As you'd probably guess, there's not a lot else to say about the operation of the player itself, but we're pleased to say that sound quality is very good, and it's certainly loud enough to drown out traffic and background noise wherever you might be using it. You'll get around 10 hours from the battery life, which we were actually a little disappointed by, given the lack of screen, but it's not far behind rivals and so shouldn't put too many people off.

You're given a decent enough pair of headphones in the box but we'd recommend picking up a better pair of in-ear buds if you want to get the most from your music.

Songs are transferred by simple drag and drop and if you want to rip audio CDs direct to the player you can download a small application from the Creative site called Creative Media Lite. This will rip tracks to your player and hard drive automatically, and if you're connected to the Internet it can sort out your ID3tag information for you.

Of course you can also use the Zen Stone as a removable hard drive by simply copying content across: you're supplied with a shortened mini-USB cable to hook it up to your PC. There's not a lot else in the box, but you can pick up additional accessories such as a key-chain, arm-strap or belt clip separately.

Overall this is an impressive little player offering a nice degree of control over your tunes, considering its nature. Most impressive, though, is the price tag: available for around £25 it's about half the price of the equivalent sized iPod Shuffle, and unless you're a truly hardcore Apple fan there's no logical reason not to choose this Creative player.

There's clearly a market for this type of portable player and, looking at the features and price tag of the Zen Stone, it's fair to say Creative has all but nailed it. The battery could do with lasting a little longer but overall this is a great little player for the money.