Product Reviews

In case you're not familiar with it, the Ministry of Sound isn't a new government department devoted to your listening pleasure, it's a legendary London nightclub, largely blamed for the dance music boom of the 90s. Not content with that, it also licenses its brand widely, in this case to British electronics company Alba.

With 2GB of flash memory inside, its capacity is at the lower end of budget players these days - enough for about 15 albums at lower compression settings, but barely enough to get the most from the JPEG photo and video playback features found on board.

Video was never going to be stunning on the dinky 2-inch display, which is in traditional format rather than widescreen, but transferring footage across is a trial before you even try to watch it. Some rather garish and poorly translated PC software utilities ('no find MP3 player') come supplied on CD, including a clumsy 'media manager', a baffling firmware update utility and an infuriating video conversion program. Fortunately, most jobs can also be done with Windows Media Player.

Video support is limited to the proprietary

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AMV format, with the supplied conversion utility boldly claiming to handle MPEG, Flash, RealMedia and even DVD files. In practice, it was hit or miss which of our files were successfully handled (and no, it won't convert encrypted commercial DVDs), and we suspect most people will give up on it rather sooner than we did.

Audio format support is barely more forgiving, but the usual suspects of WAV, MP3 and WMA present, with the latter's DRM (copy protected) flavour also accepted. This links in with the MoS-branded promotions that come bundled with the player: two free downloads from the www.mosdownload.com store, plus five free tracks pre-loaded from MoS artists. An extra audio feature is voice recording, which we found handy on a couple of occasions.

The battery lasted 12 hours and 45 minutes, which is reasonable if not especially impressive by today's standards. Sadly, though, the MP085 became frustrating to use long before that. The screen makes a reasonable job of photo and video playback, and it's bright enough for outside use, but the menu system is eccentric and slow - and good luck trying to fathom out what some of the settings do.

While the price may look attractive, you'll need to replace the atrocious headphones (don't even get us started on the internal 'speaker'). Considering that another £50 would get you a superb 8GB Sansa e280 (Web ID: 120563), which blows the MP085 out of the water in terms of usability, capacity and sound quality, we can't recommend this particular brand extension.