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

Creative’s Vado is brilliant value for money and a fine little friend to fans of web video

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.

This Christmas season, the sweet spot in digital cameras, and the place where the most competition is taking place, is in the 3 megapixel arena. And it's with this in mind that Creative has launched its first 3.2 megapixel camera - and at the very competitive price of only $399.

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 PC-CAM 850 is a 2-megapixel digital camera geared to double up as a Webcam and a camcorder. Priced at a low $279, it hosts an impressive 16MB of built-in memory, writes to both MMC and SD card media and also has S-Video output.

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.