Ever since Apple's mighty iPod hit the shelves, the competition has been running round like scalded cats designing MP3 players that might still be attractive to an ever-hungry music market. Cheaper machines with similar amounts of ...

It's not difficult to deduce that Creative got the idea for its Zen Micro hard drive music player from the Apple iPod mini. Technically the two players have a fair amount in common, and they have ...

There are many doomsayers who proclaim that the music CD is dead and that the age of the MP3, the iPod and all related portable music devices are the future of the industry. Whether or not ...

Pure Digital, or the artist formerly known in one guise as Videologic, is the latest firm to have a tie-in with a designer. We've had Microsoft involving Starck to make some rather ugly mice, while Pinnacle ...

The trend for more traditionally computing-related firms to edge towards the home entertainment arena has already seen the likes of Videologic and Apple pretty much switch sides. Creative isn't going that far, and still has its ...

There is an emerging category of consumer electronics designed to play your ever-expanding digital media collection without you sitting in front of your computer. Some have their own storage, like the majority of MP3 players, but ...

The Netgear MP101 is a media streamer and decoder with both wired and wireless Ethernet connections, a remote control, and an LCD display. In other words, it's a home MP3 player with network connections built in. ...

One of the most heavily competitive accessory markets at the moment has to be for the portable music player, which has recently had the quality bar raised by the arrival of Apple's iPod. But for those ...

Our final player is a 128MB memory key from Philips, and in many ways it is a direct competitor to the Creative MuVo. The most obvious difference is that the Philips KEY005 is a single piece ...

Philips didn't pick the 85mm x 54mm dimensions of the HDD070 player by chance, but instead it chose them carefully as they give the player exactly the same footprint as a credit card, but rather thicker ...

The vast majority of portable digital audio players use either Flash memory or a hard drive to store the MP3 or WMA files that you transfer from your PC. There are also a few players that ...

Creative is showing Apple the way forward in Europe by shipping its 4GB MuVo² (MuVo Squared) MP3 player, where Apple has failed miserably to supply the mini iPod outside of North America. This 4GB hard drive ...

Creative has just announced a new member of its MuVo Flash player family, and that has had an impact right down the line. The new MuVo TX has 256MB of storage and a USB 2.0 interface ...

At first glance the BenQ Joybee 150 model seems relatively large for a Flash memory player thanks to its boxy shape. In fact it isn't particularly large, as it is slightly smaller than the Creative Muvo² ...

Archos has a range of hard drive based players, but it isn't too happy with them being referred to as MP3 players. Partly - we suspect - because it doesn't fancy going head-to-head with Apple, Creative ...

At perhaps double the size of a credit card, and half the size of a CD case, Creative's latest Zen Xtra MP3/WMA player may be some way from being the smallest musical playback device on the ...

A generous bundle greets anyone who forks out for AOpen's XRecorder. Billed as the 'tape terminator', the pack includes plenty of leads, special editions of Ulead's PhotoImpact 7 and VideoStudio 7, the same company's Video@Home and ...

MP3 players based on solid-state memory come in all shapes and sizes, but none has a more interesting shape than the Digisette. The Duo.DX is the top model in the range, all of which look like ...

Apple's iPod has demonstrated that MP3 players based around hard drives can offer a great deal of capacity for the money. But those based on flash memory are smaller and lighter. One example of the latter ...

As you open the box of the new iPod, you have to remove a sealing sticker that carries the words 'Designed by Apple in California'. Of course the iPod is manufactured in the Far East, but ...