The tiniest player in this category is Apple’s iPod Shuffle. It’s very well built with an all aluminium outer body that is available in a number of tasteful colours. Some may find electric pink and sea blue gaudy, but we like it. These colours are very understandable for a product mainly aimed at college kids and those looking for something really funky looking. To save on space the Shuffle doesn’t even have a display. What it does have are very clear and easy-to-use controls. The four buttons for volume up / down and next / previous track are shaped to form a circle with the large play / pause button in the centre of it. The layout of these buttons is perfect and are very large and intuitive. Suiting its ultra-compact status, the Shuffle comes with a belt clip that has a good spring that grips well.

Creative’s Zen Stone Plus is the next of the really tiny players. It’s about the same footprint as the Shuffle, but a little thicker and marginally longer. Creative goes one step further and provides the Zen Stone Plus with a single-colour OLED display. This is a boon for those storing extra music as you can tell what exactly is playing, or which track is next without actually having to listen in. This PMP is very solidly built and has a loudspeaker as well. Creative has got the controls right and although they aren’t as good, in terms of feedback, as Apple’s controls, they are very well laid out and very intuitive to use. The ergonomics are top class. Unlike the Shuffle, the Zen Stone Plus uses an all-plastic body, but finished in matte texture tones. The quality of plastics used seems very good and in testament to this, the Zen Stone Plus survived (unscathed) a rather nasty drop that occurred during a photo shoot session, where it fell while running from a height of eight feet.

Philips’ GoGear SA2825 was one of the more novel designs that we’ve seen. The body is finished in burnished chrome that looks like a metallic, mirror finish, similar to the finish LG uses on some of its cell phones. It’s got a small OLED display, which is covered by a transparent plastic shell. Initially, this shell seemed to fit the player rather loosely and we were wondering if it was removable. We figured out that the shell was a large clickable button with four functions, similar to 4-way joypad keys on cell phones. The screen is reasonably clear, more so than the display on the Zen Stone Plus, and the square-shaped player with slightly rounded edges looks really neat.

The other two MP3 Players in this category are from Mitashi. The cheaper of the two is the KNM-2GB that has a really neat looking red-backlit, touch-sensitive array of buttons on the front. It’s got a decent LCD display that measures two inches diagonally. The player itself is built pretty well and looks decent with an entire black body. The front is a smooth piano finish, while the rear makes do with a slightly more rugged looking matte finish. Using this player can be a pain because the indicated controls for the buttons are not very intuitive and we found that we could not perform some very common tasks without referring to the manual. For example, the middle button will play a highlighted song, but will not pause the track.

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