You probably expect that a Sony MP3 player will be small, sleek and silver in colour, and perhaps it will have a Memory Stick slot tucked away somewhere. So it may come as a surprise to find that the Sony NW-E205 looks like a black plastic kidney bean and there's no Memory Stick in sight.

It's a chunky little device that fits snugly in the palm of your hand and measures 68 x 39 x 24mm, with a weight of 45g. Inside there's 512MB of flash memory and when you slide the cover to one side, a USB plug pops out. You plug the NW-E205 directly into your PC to transfer music, and if there's not enough clearance around the USB port you can use the short extension cable that Sony supplies.

It's at this point that two problems raise their heads. For one thing, the Sony player doesn't actually play MP3s but instead it supports ATRAC3, so you have to install the Sonic Stage 3.2 software that comes with the package in order to convert your files during the transfer process. Sonic Stage isn't particularly clever and won't spot duplicate tracks in your music library, and neither does it necessarily keep the tags on your music in good working order.

The other problem is that the interface is USB 1.1, rather than USB 2.0, so it takes a quarter of an hour to load the player with music.

When you're ready to listen to your tunes, you control the player with a four-way button that you jog inwards to make your selection, using the single row OLED display to monitor what's going on. The controls work well enough, but when you're on the move and want to lock the controls, you have to move the USB cover just so, without moving it so far that the plug pops out, which can be tricky.

We found that audio quality was very good, even with the standard earpieces, which was a surprise as Sony quotes a rather low signal-to-noise ratio of 80dB. On the positive side the claimed battery life of 50 hours is impressive, but as a closing note the price tag seems rather steep.

The Sony NW-E205 combines quirky looks with good subjective audio quality and a decent 512MB capacity, but it's not all plain sailing. We're not fans of Sony's insistence on the ATRAC format and would prefer native MP3 playback. The price also makes this Sony player unattractive.