Round-up Yes, the news is dominated by this week's revamped iPods, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of other good media players out there. Put off the colourful Nano, or the shiny Touch? Then here are ten of the best alternatives. Counting down, in reverse order, we kick of with the...

Creative Zen X-Fi

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The X-Fi's a bit of a disappointment. The lack of storage integration, the odd controls and the truly hopeless text input system all combine to take shine off a decent looking and sounding little player. It's hard to avoid the feeling that Creative have missed an open goal here by making the X-Fi so small. If it was broader and taller and came with a decent resolution 4 or 4.5in screen, we'd crawl over our dead grandmother to get one, superfluous applications notwithstanding.

Reg Rating 60%
Price £150/$200 (16GB) £240/$280 (32GB)

iRiver E100

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Not a bad box of tricks performance wise, and blessed with both better-than-average file support and Micro SD storage expansion. But you really have to not mind your media being presented to you in two separate chunks. It's bad enough if you're using a 2 or 4 GB memory card, but imagine using a 16GB one? You'd have two-thirds of the player's musical content only accessible through a basic Directory menu. No thanks.

Reg Rating 65%
Price £60 (2GB) £80/$110 (4GB) £100/$160 (8GB)

Meizu Mini Player SL

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Eighty quid for an 8GB player with Flac and AVI file support is a decent combination in anyone's language. The sound could be better and the control interface takes some getting used to, but other than that it's not a bad little player. The bundled reformatting software is best avoided, though, and we would have liked the ID tag recognition to have been more thorough.

Reg Rating 75%
Price £50 (2GB) £60 (4GB) £80 (8GB)

iRiver Lplayer

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Small, neat and clever, the Lplayer is one of the better mini MP3 players we have come across simply because it combines a small and tidy form-factor with a reasonably sized screen and pretty good sound.

Reg Rating 75%
Price £60/$100 (4GB) £80/$130 (8GB)

Creative Zen Mozaic

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The Mozaic is nothing to get too excited about, but it is very sturdy, small, light, easy to use and demonstrated excellent battery life. It's pretty good value too. If the sound quality was a little better and it showed up as an mass-storage device on Linux and Mac boxes, we'd have marked it higher. Notwithstanding that, it is still Creative's most convincing product of late, by some margin.

Reg Rating 75%
Price £50/$60 (2GB) £60/$80 (4GB) £80/$100 (8GB) £120/$150 (16GB)

Sony Bluetooth Walkman A Series

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The longer we live with the Walkman, the more we're driven to an strange conclusion. Yes, the Walkman is good - very good in fact - but like the Samsung P2, which is also very good, it's just not as flat out cool, neat, funky to own and use as an iPod. This test has underlined to us once again just what a curiously but desperately possessable gadget the iPod is. Buy the Walkman and you'll come to like it and respect it enormously, but you won't ever come to love it.

Reg Rating 80%
Price £140 (4GB) £160/$270 (8GB) £200/$320 (16GB)

Samsung YP-P2

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The P2 has all the qualities that impressed us about Samsung's T10 but with a bigger screen and a flash touchscreen UI. But it should really come in 4, 8 and 16GB flavours for the same price. As it is, unless you really do intend to watch a lot of video it's a little difficult to justify buying the P2 over it's smaller, cheaper brother.

Reg Rating 85%
Price £100/$230 (4GB) £150/$280 (8GB) £200 (16GB)

Cowon iAudio A3

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The A3 is a lovely bit of kit offering superb video and audio playback, truly comprehensive file support and a screen so good you will want to marry it and have its children. The only downsides are that to some eyes it looks a little old fashioned and has controls that fail to advance the science of user interfaces. It could do with rather more ooomph in the battery life department. It isn't cheap either but we reckon it is value for money.

Reg Rating 85%
Price £180/$330 (30GB) £239/$370 (60GB) £269/$410 (80GB)

SanDisk Sansa Clip

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If absolute compactness of design is what you are after, the Clip doesn't really put a foot wrong. It's small, light, easy to use and pumps out a decent enough sound, while the clip provides a simple and secure way of attaching the player to your person without making you look too much of a boob.

Reg Rating 88%
Price £25/$40 (1GB) £35/$60 (2GB) £49/$60 (4GB)

SanDisk Sansa Fuze

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SanDisk is excited by the idea that we'll soon all be hot-swapping our media from our phones to our cars to our hi-fi systems to our MP3 players. Maybe. In the meantime, we just like the idea of a small Flash-based MP3 player that sounds great and comes with the option to add a shedload of extra memory yet doesn't make us go poking about deep into the player's menu structure to find the content it holds, as we had to do with iRiver's E100.

Reg Rating 90%
Price £65/$80 (2GB) £75/$100 (4GB) £100/$130 (8GB)