LG MFJM53

The name won't grab you, but when you see LG's 8GB player you might want to grab it. It is stylish enough that it won a design award and it's very comfortable in the hand; about the size and shape of a slim mobile phone. It has a curve at the top for the scroll wheel, which has forward and back buttons on either side.

The MFJM53 copes with a wide range of content—pictures, video and even text files, so you could use it for ebooks, photos and TV recordings. The screen is clear and bright. Videos look surprisingly good, but it doesn't cope well with very detailed photos. Get Windows Media Player to downsample images automatically and they'll look better and take up less space.

With 8 GB of content, navigation is important. The MFJM53 actually has two parallel sets of controls, which can be confusing until you get the hang of it. As with many devices, the Play/Pause button also turns the player on. You press the Menu button on the side of the player to get the main menu, which you move through with the scroll wheel.
Pick music, videos, photos, text files, record or setup - you can press the scroll wheel or the menu button to get into the content. Instead of giving you another list to choose from, the player jumps straight to the first file and starts playing. You then use the forward and back buttons to move through music and video tracks.