The Vision M is something of an iPod imitator, but it doesn’t quite match its inspiration

As far as many people are concerned there's only one MP3 player. Love it or hate it, the iPod has entered the public consciousness and become an icon. So it's no surprise that everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon.

The 20-30GB Nomad Jukebox Zen NX is Creative's latest hard disk-based MP3/WMA player; an evolution of predecessor, the Zen. The model we reviewed was a 20GB unit, which equates to around 667 hours of 64Kbps WMA encoding, or 333 hours of 128Kbps MP3 encoding.

The Creative CD-MP3 M100 is an Mp3-CD and CD-player that supports MP3 and WMA formats, audio CDs, and CD-R and CD-RW discs.

The Nomad Jukebox Zen is Creative-s go at aping the Apple iPod (November 2002, page 40), an MP3 player built around a notebook hard drive, and has done a remarkable job of it.

With solid-state media still expensive and offering limited capacity, MP3 players with hard disks seem like the perfect solution.