MSI's media players generally come in at the budget end, and the P640 certainly looks the part to begin with – there's an excess of plastic packaging whereas most manufacturers at this level have moved on to sleek cardboard cases.

But the player itself is much better than that, design-wise. It's well-built, and sits neatly in the hand.

The display is clear, and the buttons depress satisfyingly when clicked. The menus are well put together, although the interface is the same one used by Packard Bell's new Vibe 360. It's slightly low-fi and looks somewhat dated.

That's a shame, because this is a brand new player and the rest of its design is rather good. MSI is primarily known as a maker of motherboards and graphics cards for computers, rather than peripherals. It appears, though, to have brought its design expertise to bear on MP3 players this time.

The 8GB disk has twice the amount of storage of the largest flash-memory-based players around, but the downside is that the P640 is slightly larger than most. It's not a big deal, however, because the player isn't too big. In fact, it's about the same size as the average mobile phone.

Music is transferred to the player using the supplied software or the Windows interface. This makes things quite easy – putting music on the player is a simple matter of selecting files and dropping them into the player window under My Computer.

It also comes with an FM radio and the ability to show pictures and text files as well as play videos. The video files need to be converted using the supplied software, but other than that the software doesn't need to be installed.

Music can be copied easily to the player using Windows, or it can be automatically synchronised using Windows Media Player.

The supplied earbud headphones are of a reasonable quality, although, as with most headphones supplied with portable players, it would be worth replacing them with a better quality pair for sustained listening.

The player is available from Morgan Computers.

Also consider:
Creative Zen V
A very good pocket-sized player
£120
4/5

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