Aiwa Pavit AZ-ES256

For those who want to carry around a whole stack of albums without having to poke at a screen, the Pavit would seem ideal; there's no screen at all, with Aiwa relying on buttons alone for control.

What's more, there are no cables to mess about with either. Like Creative's MuVo TX, there's a 256MB flash memory drive hidden in the player's body. Simply remove it, plug it into a USB port and... realise that you need to load up the proprietary software that converts your MP3s into its own special format.

While it's not the only player to do this, it's frustratingly unnecessary; PC novices will prefer the simplicity of Windows Explorer, and advanced users will find it far too restricting. The software provides a limited view of what's on the player, and the conversion makes large transfers tedious - as well as completely ignoring anything except MP3 files. You can use Explorer to transfer files if you like, but the Pavit will ignore them.

Once the music's transferred, there are limited options: Play, Stop, Previous, Next, Shuffle and Repeat Once. Given that there's only room for around four albums, finding what you want is made easy, and there's a lot to be said for having good old-fashioned switches and buttons to set options. It's just a shame some of these double up - the 'beep' indicator shares a three-way switch with the 'hold' function, for instance, which is just annoying.

Aside from some nice touches, such as the protective sheath around the headphone jack and the excellent headphones themselves, it's all rather lacklustre. While the Pavit is surprisingly light at just 51g, it's also one of the physically largest 256MB-capacity players we've seen.

Another factor in its favour is that you don't have to carry around a charger, with the player taking a single AAA battery. Aiwa claims a battery life of approximately 11 hours. Without a display, however, you won't get much notice before it breathes its last, so we still recommend you pack some spares.

It adds up to an attractively styled, lightweight device, but its £131 price is far too much. After all, this will very nearly buy you the far more flexible Rio Nitrus or an iRiver iFP-300 series.