MSI’s media players generally come in at the budget end, and this one certainly looks the part to begin with.

There’s an excess of plastic packaging, whereas most manufacturers at this level have moved on to sleek cardboard cases. But the player itself is much better than that, design-wise.

It’s comfortable to hold, the display is clear and the buttons are comfortable to use. The menus are intuitive and as simple as the design of the player. Though it lacks the chic of some of its rivals, the buttons were accessible by thumb with the player sat in the palm of the hand.

Music is transferred to the player using the supplied software, or by using the Windows interface. This made organising our music really easy – just select files and drop them into the player window under My Computer.

The supplied earbud headphones are of a reasonable quality, although as with most of the headphones supplied with players in this test, it would definitely be worth replacing them with a better quality pair for sustained listening.

This is one of two hard-disk-based players in our tests. The 8GB disk will store about 2,000 songs, but the downside is that the player is slightly larger than most. It’s not a big deal, however, because the P640 is about the size of the average mobile phone.

This article is part of a group test of portable music players.
See also:
Portable music players
Apple iPod nano
Creative Zen V
Iriver U10
Sandisk Sansa e260
Sony NW-A1200
A table of features can be read via our pdf download above.