3. Samsung Z5 Series

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The first thing you'll notice about this player is that it eschews the iPod style dial on the front of the player, going instead for a touch pad ringed by traditional buttons with volume control on the side. This makes the player look a little clumsy from a design perspective, with a fancy chrome stripe running around the outside of the machine not improving the look at all. The player is quite angular, which gives the machine a very old fashioned look, but it is mostly safe from fingerprints and seems to have good overall build quality.

The menu systems are all easy to navigate and it is simple to get the knack of using the Z5. The only real annoyance is that you cannot jump from the first to the last track in lists as you can with the Sansa e200 players. The touchpad control has nowhere near the same level of accuracy as a navigation wheel, and it is much too easy to go beyond the track you are aiming for. One has to delicately tap the touchpad to get the track you want, and doing so becomes even harder if you are in motion (such as walking or sat on a bus). There are no menu options for sensitivity to help make things easier, though the dedicated volume control is a nice touch.

The color screen is fine for normal navigation and showing album art, but the option to show photographs is never going to be more useful than to give a quick slideshow of holiday snaps. Sound quality on the other hand is excellent, leaps and bounds ahead of the Sansa e200 players in all areas.

As expected, the supplied headphones aren't the best, but they do an admirable job and replacing them with a better quality pair needn't be an immediate concern. Through a high quality speaker system the Samsung sounds impressive, although it struggles a little through unpowered speakers.

Battery life is a real high, lasting around 30 hours which is easily double the amount of use you can get from the Sansa e200 player. This was only tested on the 2 GB player, but there is no reason to doubt that others in the series won't offer similar performance; all share a manufacturer's claim of 35 hours. Connectivity is the same as on the Sansa player, supporting both transfer from Windows Media Player and direct drag-and-drop copying of files to the Z5. Charging is also done through the same USB cable, and as with the Sansa e200, there is no A/C adaptor available.

When it comes down to it, this is a very capable MP3 player that offers little in terms of extras, with no video playback, no radio and no voice recording. In the core elements of sound quality and battery life, however, it does a great job.