Take the Xiro internals, pop them in a groovy egg-shaped casing, lose the dodgy controls, put one-touch buttons where they are needed, add a quality pair of headphones with built in volume control and what do you have? The Apacer BP300.

Apacer's Handy Steno HT202 is one of the largest USB sticks reviewed, but its physical size belies some great performance and features.

This player has its own speaker which would be handy for instant playback of voice recordings. There is 128MB storage on board, with a MMC card slot, located in the battery compartment. The headphones clip over your ear, and are quite comfortable to wear.

Apacer Technology has announced a new model of MP3 device, the Apacer Audio Steno AU240.