SanDisk Sansa E250 MP3 player

Video-playing jukebox is hot on nano's heels.

The iPod nano is like impressionist's standby Jimmy Saville - often imitated, never bettered. This latest attempt features 2GB of Flash memory (which you can expand with MicroSD cards), a rotating Click Wheel-alike, a larger screen and the ability to play video.

Fatter and heavier than the nano - or more substantial, if you prefer - the wheel on this isn't touch sensitive, so you have to physically turn it. That feels like a step back in a way, but it does spool through lists of tunes very effectively. The screen is superb - brighter and 0.3 inches larger than the nano's - while the colourful, icon-based menu is excellent.

Pictures load quickly. Fifty files take about 1.2 seconds, with the bundled software downscaling them on the fly. The wheel whizzes through them, but you have to switch from the 'zoomed in' to the 'thumbnail' view when you want to move to the next image, and pictures don't automatically scale to fill the screen.

Video is smooth, but a little washed out. A 4MB WMV takes just over two minutes to transfer.
Sound-wise it's good, but not great. Love Cats by The Cure has plenty of bass, but doesn't sound quite as crisp as it does on the nano. It's also quieter - you need to whack the volume up to full to hear it over the din of London's tubes.

Another interesting feature is the inclusion of a memory card slot. If you fork out around £35 extra for a 1GB MicroSD card, you can add another 250 tunes, or more pics and video.

The Flash MP3-player market is no longer a one-horse race. Great menus, a top-class screen and video capability make this another worthy adversary to the nano. Goodness gracious me!