Striking a nice balance between value for money and quality, the MF-PD330 is certainly worth considering. The most innovative thing about it is the fact that the controls aren't actually on the player, but are on the headphone cable, in the style of most Minidisc players.

This is also the area where the track name and information is displayed, which means that you don't have to fumble in your pocket to change the volume or scan through the tracks.

The device is unusual in that it has no on-board memory as such, instead using its own non-standard multimedia cards to store the MP3 files. These tiny cards are the size of a postage stamp and there are two slots to hold them on top of the player. Two 16Mb cards are supplied and you can buy new 16Mb cards for GBP 47 or 32Mb cards for GBP 59. All the other players in our test have their own on-board memory, along with an option to add more through Smartmedia cards.

Sound quality is not quite up to the standard of the Diamond or Samsung players, but it isn't far off. There's no Dictaphone function, but the MF-PD330 has the standard bass boost and sound equalisation controls. Other nifty features include a sleep timer and a preview function that lets you listen to the first few seconds of a track.

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