On our desk this week - 5

SwissBit S.Beat

Dib Dib Dib! Swiss Army knives have been a mainstay of boy scouts since time began. Whether it was carving walking sticks with the knife attachment or removing splinters with the tweezers, no pre-teen worth his salt would be caught without one (although what's with the nail file on every one? Who's going to use that? Girl Guides maybe? -Ed)

These days, the knives are rather more multipurpose. The model we're looking at today, the S.Beat, contains a 1GB MP3 player alongside the rather more traditional knife, scissors and nail file. Is this the ultimate multi-purpose belt-hanger, or just a waste of perfectly good pocket space?

The player is detachable from the main body of the knife for docking to USB. It also means that you can take the MP3 player on the plane without having to put a knife in your carry-on luggage! Once you've got it on your machine, it's simply a case of dragging and dropping to the drive in My Computer. Pretty simple really, although you can't use subscription content from services like Napster that are part of the PlaysForSure Microsoft initiative.

Also included is a remote control, which is compulsory if you want to use headphones other than the ones that are included - the jack on the MP3 player is not a standard 3.5mm jack. The remote has a four-way d-pad that gives you track and volume up/down functions. These functions are replicated on the player itself with a four-way nipple.

One of the best things about the player is the mains adaptor. It has a USB socket to plug the player into, then a series of sliders allow you to get the correct electrical pins for whichever country you have to be in. This is fairly nifty, and adds to the 'hardened traveller' creds of the S.Beat.

The main body of the player sports a small screen which is just enough to get one line of text scrolling across for song information. It's a pretty slow display, meaning you get tear on the text as it runs across. The menu system is not ideal, and makes finding one particular track amongst your 1GB of music pretty hard going.

All in all, this is a very odd product. If you're the sort of person that carries a pocket knife everywhere you go, you might appreciate having added MP3 functionality too. For the rest of us, we'll probably just go and buy a proper MP3 player with a decent menu system and put up with being caught short in those all-important twig-carving situations.

Name: Swissbit S.Beat
Buy it from: Advanced MP3 Players
Cost: £119 for 1GB
Verdict: An interesting curio, but possibly of limited real-world use.