On our desk this week - 3

iRiver T20

There's a huge market for teeny-tiny MP3 players, and iRiver has a whole bundle of them. This, the T20, is a fairly middle-of-the-range player that does the job without appearing to be anything particularly spectacular.

It comes in 512MB and 1GB versions which are priced at £90 and £120.

The unit has playback controls down the side, and a small LCD screen on the front. It's only a few characters wide, so your song titles will be spending their time scrolling across. The hold switch is on the front. In general, because the player is so small (and consequently lanyardable), all the buttons are a bit too tiny for my liking. The hold switch in particular is something of an effort.

The player plugs straight into a USB 2.0 port by sliding out the little connector, which is quite funky and a better solution than the cap that goes with Apple's iPod shuffle.

The top of the player has a socket for headphone out and a socket for Line In, since you can record directly onto this player should you not want to just transfer MP3s straight across (or for more practical uses like hooking up a microphone). Speaking of transferring, the player uses the Windows Media format and will basically only synchronise using Windows Media Player 10. You are able to use downloads grabbed from subscription services such as Napster, as the player is tied into the Plays For Sure scheme.

As you might spot from the sticker on the back, the player supports SRS WOW effects. These add some added separation and positional funkiness to the audio, at the cost of battery life and general sound quality. Frankly, I've never taken much tack with fake positional audio in MP3 players, and this is no different.

Sound quality in general is pretty much what you'd expect: pretty good, but never going to blow you away. There are all sorts of EQ effects you can fiddle with, but the playback will probably be more dependent on the headphones you use than anything else. You can forget about the ones in the box, they're not exactly brill.

The problem the T20 faces is that the 1GB version is £120, but the 2GB iPod Nano - a better player in every regard - is just £140. For that extra £20, you get so much more. The 512MB version is £90, but you can get a 1GB Shuffle for that. Unfortunately for iRiver, Apple has them totally beat on industrial design and pricing, and you don't have to use lame WMA.

All in all, a player that's fine if you want to play WMA, but everyone else should probably look for something more, how shall we say, fruity.

Name: iRiver T20
Buy it from: Advanced MP3 players
Cost: £90 for 512MB, £120 for 1GB
Verdict: Nothing really wrong with it, but pricing is poor compared to Apple. Utterly middle of the road.