iRiver Lplayer 8GB MP3 player

Once mastered, the controls allow you to zip around the menus with abandon, and there is little in the way of lag or pause. Scrolling through lists could perhaps be just a tad faster, but we could live with it as is.

Format support is what you would expect from iRiver, which has always offered plenty: MP3, WMA, Ogg, ASF and Flac on the audio side of the fence, and MPEG 4, WMV and Xvid on the video. The L-Player also comes with a recordable FM radio, variable bitrate voice recorder and support for JPEG, BMP, PNG and GIF still images. It'll display text files too.

Around the back is a 'hold/lock' slider

The Lplayer doesn't support Audible .aa files, but does allow you to bookmark audio files, which is handy if you want to rip your own audiobook CDs.

The FM radio comes with a handy “auto-pre-set” function that will quickly scan through all available frequencies and allocate a pre-set to each one. Sound quality was one of the few things the E100 did well, so it would be a major surprise if the Lplayer didn't at least match it.

On board are the same EQ pre-sets and SRS WOW HD sound modification system. The latter allows for all sorts of wild and wacky spatial effects, which are either a great idea or a total waste of time depending on how you like your music.