Review Apple's iPod line-up has, like it or not, become the benchmark by which other personal digital music players are judged. That's not to say they always measure up to the competition, and they've usually taken longer to adopt new features, such as colour displays and photo browsing, than their rivals have.

But whether it's marketing savvy or marketing dollars that have done the trick, the iPod range has come to define what a significant number of consumers expect from a media player, to the extent that almost everyone is now targeting the Apple players directly.

Aigo's P880 is pitched at the iPod Photo, matching the latter's picture and music playback facilities, and throwing in a heap of other features for good measure. The P880 is certainly an improvement on Aigo's other hard drive-based player, the more standard-iPod oriented P750. It's better looking, sports a funkier user interface and, like the Photo, boasts a colour display - in spite of which, it still manages to offer a better battery life than its stablemate.

Not that Apple needs fear for the future of its iPod Photo. For starters, the P880 is a chunkier beast, massing it up to 11.2 x 7.1 x 2cm to the Apple product's more svelte 10.3 x 6 x 1.6cm. Inside is a lower-capacity hard drive - 20GB to the iPod's 30GB - and a less long-running battery - 11-odd hours to the iPod's claimed 15 hours.

The P880's 65,536-colour screen is, however, slightly larger - 2.2in in the diagonal to the iPod's 2in job - and looks great. The bright light in the centre of the P880's four-way navigation control offers fewer colours - seven, in fact - but it's nice that you can change it if you wish.

The control itself requires a fair push in each direction to get it to engage. That's less of a problem when you move through the P880's iPod-like sequences of menus, but it does quickly become a chore to scroll through a long list of songs, up and down the FM radio spectrum or through a large folder of photos. Scroll-wheels and even jog-dials have a clear edge here.

Viewing pictures is just a matter of navigating the appropriate folders on the P880's hard disk and working your way through the icon, preview or full-screen views. Since the screen is so small, why you need an intermediate size between the icons and the full-screen view is anyone's guess.

There's a handy auto-play feature and, oddly, a separate option called Slideshow. The latter differentiates itself by playing a backing track. You create slideshows not in the relevant Main Menu entry but through the Photos option, where you can also activate the auto-play facility. What's the point of having two features that do the same thing, I originally thought. But then it struck me that saving slideshows allows you to come back to them later, the photographic equivalent of a playlist. Fine, but since the slideshow just grabs all the contents of whatever folder you're viewing at the time, you may as well just navigate to the right folder and choose auto-play.

However you run through your pictures, manually or in an automatic mode, the reproduction isn't bad, but the device's image-scaling algorithm renders some portions of the full-screen image blocky and/or blurred, so the more quality-conscious user may prefer to scale them to the right size in Photoshop first.

But then a 2.2in display isn't really the kind of thing you want to while away an hour or two perusing your family album, is it? Not for me, at any rate. It would be better if Aigo provided a way of connecting the P880 to a TV, but it doesn't.

The manufacturer has, on the other hand, made it relatively easy to get photos onto the player. There's not only a built-in SD card slot, but the player also supports USB To Go, allowing it to suck piccies straight off a suitably equipped camera. Alas, my digicam isn't thus endowed, so I couldn't test this, but I did copy a stack of shots off an SD card I had lying around.

You use the player's file browser, Files, to access the card and/or the camera - select the storage medium, hit the Menu button and choose the Upload option. You can't select specific images to transfer - it's an all-or-nothing option. Nor can you preview the images on the card - Files doesn't display photo icons, and Photos, which can show icons, can't look beyond the confines of the Photos folder on the P880's hard drive. The Upload process also copies the entire folder structure with the card to the hard drive.

The P880 only supports baseline JPEG files, so more complex version of the format, and GIFs, BMPs and so on are useless here. Music support is a little more comprehensive, with the usual MP3, DRM-less WMA and WAV handled. Playback isn't bad, but it's not exceptional either. There are 23 EQ pre-sets, none of which did much to improve the sound, and neither do the terrible, boxy-sounding earphones Airgo bundles with the product. With a range of other phones - iPod, Neuros, Sennheiser - the results are much better.

The built-in FM radio was a disappointment. I found reception to be poor, even though the Griffin Technology RadioShark receiver I was using for side-by-side comparison was picking up broadcasts perfectly. If you do manage to get your favourite station coming through loud and clear, pressing the red button on the left-hand side of the P880 allows you to record the programming direct to MP3. The device has a microphone for voice recording too - you select which input you want to use via the Recordings menu option.

Verdict

The P880 isn't actually bad, but neither does it inspire. It works, and that's about the best you can say about it. It's the software that lets it down, largely because it's just too awkward for a Western consumer electronics device. Importing pictures, say, should be a single-click action and not force you to navigate through two separate menu options.

Keep it simple, guys, and you'll be on your way to seeing why Apple and others are leading the game. ®

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