The popularity the DAP enjoys in Europe and Japan is not self-evident on a quick viewing of the player. It is a boxy little thing, a bit smaller than a packet of cigarettes, drab black in colour which is a rubberised compound helping to ruggedise the DAP as a 'go-anywhere' MP3 player. The control buttons are sparse, a simple array for stopping, playing, reverse and forward navigation of tracks placed above the LCD window; and another lot of three buttons for volume and setting miscellaneous functions like memory status and bass and treble.

Apart from the reasonable cost, reasonable in the context of this Labs, it has the best expansion capabilities of all the portable players with 64Mb of onboard memory and a SmartMedia slot that will allow a further 64Mb storage allowing a possible 128Mb in total. Access to the slot is like the Nomad II, that is, through the battery compartment, making it awkward to get to.

The most amazing feature of the DAP that we found is not immediately apparent but was stumbled upon by accident. During the course of testing we had cause to leave the DAP on and plugged into our testbed downloading music to it. The belief was that the battery would cut off after the download had lapsed and we could carry on the following morning. When we came in the next day the DAP was still connected and the backlight was still on. There was still ample charge left in the battery for us to complete all our testing. While we didn't time battery consumption, the DAP turned in an amazing performance in this regard.

In playback of our reference files the DAP was a good contender. It was marked down noticeably for some inexplicable pops heard in the quiet periods of Albignoni's Adagio. The software bundle included a version of the AudioCatalyst encoder which was infuriating in only permitting a random selection of tracks that could be ripped and encoded. Registration of the product will permit full functionality.

Our concluding impressions are that the DAP is a winner as a music player following the KISS (keep it simple stupid) principle but loses out to competitors who address additional features in their product. Other products in the stable will be appearing over time and it will be interesting to see whether the foreign success of the DAP is mirrored here.