Once you’ve mastered the touch-screen you’ll have plenty of fun with this great effort from LG

An excellent player from Samsung, combing outstanding innovation with great sound and picture clarity

If you want an alternative to Apple, here’s a great (and cheap) place to start

It may be pricey, but Sony's Walkman is a fine MP3 player and a good alternative to everything Apple

Features voice recording and an FM tuner. The device can be fiddly to operate, and the LCD screen doesn't display any track information other than the title. There is no playlist management, and no directory structure for your tracks. Voice recording allows the sampling rate to be set up to 48,000Hz.

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.

The DAV310 from A-MAX Technology circumvents this limitation by being able to play MP3 tracks straight off a CD - just like your PC can.

As a portable music player the E-Sounds is a performer of the highest calibre across all styles.