There are a lot of hard disk-based media devices around at the moment, and Packard Bell's Store & Play is one of the better looking ones.

Built using a 2.5in notebook computer hard disk instead of a standard 3.5in desktop model, the Store & Play is slim and portable. Its brushed aluminium slate grey shell looks both tough and stylish.

It's not just a hard disk, either. Slots on the front allow Compactflash, Smartmedia, Memorystick, MMC and SD memory cards to be inserted, offering the ability to copy files from, say, a camera directly to the Store & Play's hard disk.

Setup is simple. Plug the unit into a PC and it will be recognised as an external drive. Oddly, the device hogs two USB ports when connected to the computer using its dual-USB cable.

Load up the hard disk's 50Gb capacity with movies, music and photos from a computer and then plug it into a TV and hi-fi to enjoy your digital media in the comfort of your living room.

The Store & Play is only compatible with a handful of formats; MPEG1 and MPEG4 for movies, BMP and JPEG for photos and MP3 or WMA for songs.

Unfortunately Packard Bell doesn't supply a utility to convert your existing media collection to the appropriate file types. The only software provided is a backup program.

We noticed that storing certain incompatible file types to the unit's 'movies' folder seemed to cause the Store & Play to crash when browsing the device in movie mode. We also had a problem with distorted audio on some video files, although it's possible this issue was due to a fault in our review unit.

Audio and picture quality were pretty good on files that the unit was happy playing back. The trouble is that without any software to unify the various different formats, codecs and file types available, even files that were supposedly compatible seemed to suffer from unexpected playback issues.

The Store & Play is definitely very small, very neat and we like the memory card feature. But we've seen devices like this with bigger capacities, wider format support and better selections of audio/video connections.

Also consider
LaCie Silverscreen
Overall: A simple way to watch or listen to digital media on your TV, but there are cheaper alternatives
Rating: 3/5
Price: £164

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