Goodmans GPDR40

There are a number of portable media players around but Goodmans' GPDR40 is one of the better ones.

It's a small handheld device, measuring just bigger than a pack of cards, so it can be held quite easily in one hand. It has a bright 3.6in colour screen with a tiny joystick next to it, which allows you to navigate through the various audio and video options from the on-screen menu.

As well as video and audio playback, one of the GPDR40's most appealing features is its recording ability. It has a video input socket that allows you to record straight onto its built-in 40Gb hard disk.

This storage facility is big enough to store between 44 and 177 hours of video, depending on the quality settings you choose. The 'normal' quality setting will let you record about 88 hours of video, and is perfectly adequate for watching TV recordings on the train to work in the mornings.

You can transfer music and video from a PC to the player via USB 2, and it's even got a built-in microphone for making voice recordings. You can also view JPEG photos and expand the storage capacity by using the memory card slot.

The unit is well designed, easy to use and competitively priced. But it does have a few rough edges. Battery life when playing video is only about 2.5 hours, which is disappointing.

And, for some odd reason, the GPDR40 can only play video clips stored in Microsoft's relatively little-known ASF file format. If you want to use any other file format, including WMV, AVI, or MPEG2, you'll need to use the bundled File Converter software to convert every clip into the aforementioned ASF.

It also leaves you a bit limited if you want to play video material you've created yourself.

Nevertheless, the menu system is easy to navigate through audio and video files and the sound quality is reasonably good.