3. JVC Alneo XA-F107

The Alneo is nearly twice the size of the Sony, but it's still light enough to wear around your neck, and it's lightweight without feeling flimsy. It comes with a stylish pair of earbud headphones with a transparent silver cable that doubles as a neck lanyard. One end loops through an attachment on the player, while the other has an adjustable slider so you can choose how low to carry the Alneo; the slider goes behind your neck so the player isn't dragging on your ears. The cable is reinforced by a metal mesh and the connections are encased, so the weight of the player won't pull out any connections. It's well designed, but while the sound from the headphones is fair, they're not particularly comfortable.

The larger size of this unit means that there's room to arrange the controls logically. The play/pause, forward and back buttons are on the front, along with the four-line LCD. The screen shows one line of useful information, including volume, battery and track format, two lines of track information, and counters for how far through your library you are and how far through the song you've played. Volume controls are on one end next to the headphone socket (the top when you wear it round your neck) and the stop button is on the side, with the record and menu buttons. Even with the four-line display, navigating to a specific album or track can be confusing, because you have to use the Stop button to go up a level.

A small flap on the lower edge covers the USB port and line-in socket. Despite its size, the Alneo doesn't have its own USB connector; you have to plug in a cable to connect it to a PC. File transfers are fast, but the cable is one more thing to keep track of. You can also plug in a cable to record from a CD player, PC, radio or other powered source; if you want to record from a microphone, it will need its own power.

Like the rest of the navigation, the controls for this are a little confusing. You can't just press the Record button - you have to select Line In from the menu, press Record, and then start the CD. The Alneo detects gaps between tracks and splits the recording. When you're done you press Menu to exit recording mode rather than Stop. The resulting quality depends on the source; recording from a CD or PC gives you an MP3 you'll be happy to listen to, though the auto-numbered filenames aren't exactly what you'd call memorable.

Battery life is around ten hours, enough to get you through a working day. There are some thoughtful touches to the Alneo, too. You can delete tracks directly from the player without connecting it up to a PC, and you can set it to turn off after a certain amount of time. (Play yourself to sleep and save batteries at the same time!) You can even tweak the contrast and brightness for the display. But anything more than basic navigation is confusing, you need a cable to connect it, and the sound quality is a little disappointing, with playback sounding somewhat flat.