Creative Technology ZEN X-Fi (8 GB) Digital Media Player

The X-Fi has a Wi-Fi adapter (802.11b/g) built into it and once you've used this to hook up to your home Wi-Fi network, you can register it with your Yahoo Instant Messenger or Windows Live Messenger accounts and get messaging. Alas, for the X-Fi, this is not the killer feature Creative might have hoped for. Quite apart from the fact that set up is tortuous – you have to create an account on Creative's website, enter your chat login details there, then login twice on the player before you start - text entry is painfully slow.

The X-Fi is equipped with a nine-button control console to the right of its 2.5in 320 x 240 resolution screen and this is used to tap out letters. But instead of working, as you might expect, like T9 or multitap text entry on a mobile phone keypad, you use it like a directional pad to highlight and then select letters on a screen-based virtual keypad. There is an alternative way of entering text, where letters are arranged around the edge of the screen, but this is even more confusing and difficult to use.

Fortunately for the X-Fi, the rest of the product is a lot more impressive than its IM abilities, and it's absolutely crammed with features. With the Wi-Fi connection, for instance, you can also stream and download tracks from a networked media library. In this way, you can use it as a convenient, portable music-streaming gateway and connect it to any music system to gain access to your PC's music collection.

Transferring tracks is a little slow over Wi-Fi - you wouldn't want to copy more than a few tracks at a time - but it's a nice feature to have. Browsing the media library on your PC while you listen is a surprisingly pleasant experience, and for copying across the odd album, it works very well. The Wi-Fi also allows you to listen to a selection of podcast material stored on Creative's servers, including some BBC content, but this is of less use since you can't download content to the device.

Other features include decent 16GB or 32GB capacities (there's an 8GB version but this doesn't have Wi-Fi); an FM tuner; a built-in speaker - for people who like annoying others on public transport - basic synchronisation of contacts tasks and calendar appointments with Microsoft Outlook; an integrated microphone so you can turn the X-Fi into a dictaphone if you want; and memory expansion via an SDHC memory card slot. That's quite a list.

In terms of its design, it's a little bit of a disappointment. It's not particularly slim at 12.8mm or small at 83mm x 55mm and though the flat gloss front, chrome-effect trim and matte silver rear look smart enough, the all plastic construction is nowhere near as luxurious as you get with any of the iPod products.

But that strange control system does work well once you get used to it, and in conjunction with Creative's excellent user interface, it makes the X-Fi a pleasure to use. The raised buttons make it easy to skip tracks, pause and change volume without having to take it out of your pocket. The menus are customisable with different graphical themes and colours, and items on it can even be re-ordered if you so wish. There are search and artist look-up functions, on-the-fly playlist creation, and you can also place bookmarks using the context-sensitive menu system - useful when listening to long podcasts.

Despite this, though, the X-Fi remains a highly impressive player. It's absolutely crammed with features - some useful, some not - has good storage capacity and its memo

-clean sound, presence of loud speaker, long time works, small size, good display and navigation other great deal...