People who have been in and around the technology industry for a decade or two might argue that we're nearing a peak, certainly in terms of consumer gadgets and peripherals. The elements that drive the industry in this sector centre on developments in miniaturisation, usability and performance, combining with efficient production that drives prices down to levels that almost everyone can afford.

Many new products are so effective at what they do that it's difficult to imagine how they can be improved, bar more radical advancements, so we're left with companies using more of a 'mix and match' approach to try to carve out subtle niches in design that offer more appeal.

Touch-screen technology is one of many recent advancements and, certainly in the case of devices such as PDAs and GPS systems, it's difficult to see how we'd do without it. Most would agree that MP3 players have got along fine as they are so far, but LG attempts to disprove this theory with its recent Touch FM37.

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Winning a Red Dot design award for its appealing aesthetics, it certainly hits the right notes on the style front, sporting an attractive, rough-brushed aluminium casing and large 2.4-inch touch-screen display.

As you'd expect, there aren't a lot of additional controls on the device: you'll simply find a power/hold button and shortcut to the built-in voice recorder on the side. Everything else is managed via the touch-screen, which uses a combination of Nintendo DS-style swiping motions (minus the stylus) or an optional on-screen control pad to give you the tools you need to navigate around.

In the case of the former, you can adjust the volume by circling your finger clockwise or anti-clockwise on the screen, skip tracks by swiping to the left or right, or pause/play by tapping the centre. The optional control box display brings up these controls in a more conventional, button-oriented manner if you'd prefer, but navigating in this way leads us to highlight one of the first issues we had.

Buttons are rather small on-screen, so navigating around, both in terms of controlling media and browsing through the features, can be quite awkward. It's easy to hit the wrong part of the screen by accident, and when you combine this with the fact that the display is very difficult to view in direct sunlight and even more awkward to use if you're moving around, you'll find usability to be drastically reduced in comparison with conventional controls.

There are quite a few nice features here, though, including an FM radio, photo viewer, voice recorder, text viewer, video player and of course audio playback. There are also a couple of touch-screen oriented games that are quite fun, albeit rather basic. Media control is adequate without being outstanding, with a fair degree of options available to fine-tune the impressive audio or video performance if you so wish. The battery life is about standard at 20 hours for audio and three for video and, despite the touch-screen capabilities, it's not too overpriced.

In terms of support, you can drag and drop audio and photos but need to use the supplied LG Media Center and Media Converter software if you want any chance of getting viewable video on-board. This can be rather awkward and the process seems a little drawn out in terms of establishing a compatible format and copying across - not the first time we've encountered such problems with portable players.

Aside from this, our main gripe with the Touch FM37 remains the touch-screen operation, which unfortunately is a major factor considering the design. It's difficult to see how usability could have been enhanced by using the technology in this way and most people who have used a Touch FM37 would probably agree that a well designed control set would have been a far more effective way of going about things.

Despite a decent range of features and impressive media playback, the touch-screen really seems quite unnecessary and only serves to make the Touch FM37 rather awkward and frustrating to use.