The term MP3 player has become generic for pocket-sized music players, but in reality the high-end models do a lot more than play music tracks. The i-Station i2 is a fully-fledged multimedia player, offering recorded TV and movie playback, music, e-books and games. It can act as a store for digital photos from your camera and even offer dictionary definitions.

The i-Station i2 measures 12cm x 7.5cm and is around 2cm thick, making it easily pocketable. There's a slimline lithium-ion battery pack set into the back and this is good for seven hours of video playback or 15 hours of music. Most of the front panel is taken up by a 90mm diagonal, 320 x 240 pixel, full-colour LCD display. This is a high-quality panel, well up to playing back a full-length feature film, not just a music video.

A small jog-stick can be used for navigating the menus, along with selector and return buttons, but by far the quickest way of operating the player is with the stylus and touch-sensitive LCD. A neat extra is that the stylus can be stuck into a hole in the back of the player to become a support, when you're viewing on a tray table or desktop.

The particular model we tested contained a 20GB hard drive, but a 30GB version is also available for an extra £30. Even the 20GB model is capable of storing up to 25 full-length movies or 4,500 MP3 files.

The operating system enables you to move through the various functions of the device without getting lost in files and folders, but this way of working is also supported, if you like to know how your media's structured.

Sockets at the two ends of the player provide S-Video and TV output, USB 2 out and power in from the supplied charger unit. The final socket is for the supplied ear buds, which ably support the quality sound produced by the player. The device provides both Dolby and SRS and plays back music with plenty of life and surprisingly good bass presence.

The only feature missing from the i-Station i2 is the ability to record video directly into the box. Although voice recording and directing encoding are both available, you have to download movies from a PC. Several high-compression algorithms are supported, including DivX, Xvid and MPEG4 and playback is clean and suffers from no artefacts that we could see.

At first glance the price might appear high, but you have to compare the i-Station with similar devices from Creative and Archos. The 30GB Creative Zen Vision:M costs £365 and even the Archos AV 420 is £269. Viewed this way, the i-Station is a high-value, quality multimedia player.