Creative’s Zen Stone is a new micro-sized mp3 player aimed directly at the iPod Shuffle market.

It sacrifices a display in the name of portability, comes in a choice of six colours and, inevitably, you can now pick up a range of accessories for it.

As expected from a player of this nature it’s very straightforward to use, simply plug it into your PC with the supplied shortened mini-USB cable and drag and drop your tracks across.

A simple directional pad on the front allows you to adjust volume, skip and search and pause and play. It’s responsive enough and the depressed design makes it fairly easy to use by touch. On the top of the unit is a flick switch that adds a little more functionality by allowing you to move forwards through your collection an album at a time. You can also randomise playback to mix things up a bit; an extremely worthwhile addition for a player of this type.

Sound quality is very good. It’s easily loud enough to use when out and about and you’re given some decent enough headphones in the box. Of course, you can also use the Stone as a portable hard drive by dragging content across, and if you want to rip CDs you can do so directly by downloading a small application from the Creative site called Creative Media Lite, which can also sort out your ID3tags for you.

The most impressive feature is the price tag. This 1GB player is currently available for around £27.99, around half the price of the iPod Shuffle. As you might imagine with a player of this nature, there’s not a lot to criticise about it when you realise how cheap you can pick one up for.

It would have been good to see Creative squeeze a little more juice from the battery considering the lack of display. However, playback stands at around 10 hours, which will be acceptable for most and only slightly behind the iPod Shuffle. However, the mini-USB connectivity is far more convenient that the Shuffle’s dock system.