Packard Bell Vibe 360 digital music player

The Vibe 360 is an extremely well-designed mp3 player that ought to give Apple's iPod Nano a run for its money.

Unfortunately, it's more expensive than the Nano and the software that allows you to transfer your music and other files onto the Vibe 360 is a bit of a mess.

Itís similar in size to the Nano, measuring just 9cm high, 4cm wide, less than 1cm thick and weighing 45g.

From a technical point of view, though, the Vibe beats the Nano hands down. It's got a bigger screen – 1.8in compared to 1.5in for the Nano – and as well as playing music and displaying photos, it can also play video files – something the Nano can't do.

It also has an FM radio tuner, plays DRM-encrypted files and boasts a battery life of 15 hours. The menu system is intuitive and good-looking, with colour icons representing the different functions.

Transferring music onto the Vibe is fairly straightforward as it works with the Windows Media Player. However, transferring photos or video clips onto it proved to be a bit more complicated.

To transfer photos, a program called Magic Picture is needed. Unfortunately, when this was installed on our PC it wasn't added to the main Windows Start menu, so we had to search our hard disk to find it.

The Video Toolbox program is used to prepare video clips and was much easier to find, but confusing to use. It seems to have been designed for use with mobile phones, starting off by instructing you to choose a 'mobile carrier'.

It allows video clips to be converted into a number of formats but doesn't make it clear which format the Vibe supports. After more rooting around, we found it was a format called m-jpeg, which most people will probably never have heard of.

These problems are a great shame as the Vibe's video capabilities give it an edge over the Nano. However, the Vibe's biggest weakness will probably prove to be its price.

Our 2GB review unit costs £120, compared to just £99 for a 2GB Nano. There's also a 1GB version that costs a more reasonable £80, but Packard Bell needs to sort out the Vibe's software if it hopes to make any headway against the all-powerful iPod.

Also consider

Apple iPod Nano

Overall The flawless menu system combined with an expansion in storage means that Apple, on the verge of losing its crown at the top of the digital music tree, regains its position just in time

Rating 5

Price £129

All mp3 player reviews