Rio CE2100

Looks and sounds good, shame about the arch-rival.

While we're sure it wouldn't stand up to either the abuse or the water, we're dying to try skimming this beauty off Brighton beach - see how many skips we can get out of it.

As far as we can tell, this is almost identical to the similarly pebble-like Rio Carbon in all but the hard disk size. But as much as we loved the Carbon, the times, as Bob Dylan would say, they are a-changin'. After all, the 4GB iPod mini is now only £140 and has an 18-hour battery life.

This 2.5GB player is incredibly easy to use, although it feels odd having a Select button on the front and a jog-wheel far away on the top corner - navigation isn't a one-finger process. Despite its punitive size, the LCD holds a fair amount of useful info and can be read clearly.

As we've come to expect, Rio provides some beautifully simple but effective means of finding your tracks, with the most useful being able to see just the songs you loaded onto it last. You can also search by the year the song was released - perfect for nostalgic trips back to 1988's summer of love. Unfortunately, you can't make playlists on the fly.

Sound quality is pretty good, battery life is a respectable 20 hours, and you can add tunes (and recharge the juice) very quickly using USB 2.0.

We really like this product, but when you can get a shiny new 6GB iPod mini for the same money, this doesn't look great value - £170 is hardly a drop in the ocean.