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The unit is small and light – no pun intended – it will fit into the palm of my hand and weights less than 100grams. The dimensions are 8x5.5x1.5cm. I suppose technically it is cream rather than white and the sides are shiny chrome. There are five buttons on the face of the unit and these are matt chrome. A case with belt clip is supplied.

The left side has three inputs for line out or earbuds, mini USB, and DC input, all supplied apart from the line out lead. The right side has four further buttons including two to increase or decrease volume, most of the tasks these conduct can be achieved from the five buttons on the face.

See also: Media players

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Also on the face is a 2.5x2.5cm mono display this can display several lines of information. The backlight remains on permanently when on mains power and for a few seconds after a button press when on the rechargeable battery - up to ten hours on a charge - it is possible to recharge quite successfully while using the unit in either MP3 or FM Radio mode.

Unlike most radios with these sort of devices this one is quite reasonable. You can store up to ten stations for immediate listening, but the initial tune is still quite laborious as you have to scroll up or down the complete band.

As an MP3 player the sound output was rather good. There are two main software packages provided a Philips version of the excellent Music Match software and Digital Media Manager that you must use to transfer tracks to the unit from the PC. This is quite a nice piece of software allowing you to specify several places to take tracks from, a counter tells you how much space remains and other useful information.

The capacity is 2GB and this is actually 1.87GB available for storage once conversions have been completed. It is also possible to use the unit as a mule for file storage or transfer but music files will not be played unless transferred through the Digital Media Manager software.

Connect the unit to the PC and it automatically switches on and appears as a drive letter in My Computer and Digital Media Manager will also open.

I copied 285 tracks to the unit and these were using just under a gigabyte of storage. To play these once took around 23 hours of playing time. Given the time of year and cold and wet weather most of this was indoors and through speakers, the dual line out and earbud socket worked well. The earbuds were adequate although for longer use I preferred my own over an in ear pieces. This is a USB 1.1 unit and I tended to know this by speed of track transfer before I got it confirmed. Likely price around £150.

Link : http://www.consumer.philips.com/consumer/catalog/product.jsp?productId=HDD070_05_GB_CONSUMER