Becker has recently expanded its portfolio with a range of in-car oriented navigation and media playback solutions. The Vision Pro is its headline player for staying entertained on the move. In reality it's simply a jumped-up media player, offering similar features and support to today's more typical portable offerings.

The biggest difference with the Vision Pro is its size: measuring almost ten inches wide and an inch and a half deep, it requires two hands to hold but benefits from a 7-inch, 800 x 480 pixel touch-screen.

Media support is typical of today's market, offering playback of a range of audio formats including MP3 and compressed video standards along with JPG and BMP photo viewing. You'll also find a built-in DVD player and an attachment to fit an optional TV/radio tuner to increase functionality even further.

Bizarrely, though, there's no internal hard disk, so if you want to view external media you'll have to either copy it to an SD card or connect a USB flash drive using the supplied mini-USB adaptor. In doing so you'll find the relevant movies/pictures/music icons light up on the main menu display as the device detects compatible media.

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We noticed a couple of problems here though, notably that it doesn't seem to recognise external hard drives, even ultra-portables, so you're left with the rather limited capacities of memory sticks or cards on which to copy media. We also found that you often need to restart the device when you attach the storage before it recognises content, which is an irritating glitch that could surely have been ironed out.

Playback is controlled via the touch-screen and there's a reasonable range of options for media management including aspect control for video, bass and treble controls and some environment presets to enhance audio. Unfortunately we weren't overly impressed by the sound: the unit sports four 1.5W speakers that are fairly loud but distort at higher volumes and aren't exactly ground-breaking in terms of clarity. The quality of the display for video playback is a bit better but suffers a bit in brightly lit environments which might be a problem if you're using it in a car.

The range of potential uses for the Vision Pro is impressive enough: provided you're willing to invest in an optional TV tuner it'd also double up nicely as a small additional television set in a kitchen or study. Media format support is very good - we didn't have any issues with playback of any of the formats or encoding standards we tried - and using the A/V out connection on-board you'll find you can output to a television or hi-fi to enjoy content on a more powerful system.

Considering you'll currently pay around £380 for the Vision Pro it's certainly not cheap. For quite a bit less you can pick up a high-end portable media player with better performance and functionality, but you will obviously sacrifice the large display and built-in DVD player. If you're specifically looking for a portable media player with a large enough screen to enjoy comfortably and aren't overly concerned about top-notch audio or video performance you'll certainly find the Vision Pro solid and well featured enough to keep the whole family entertained.

Performance issues aside, the Vision Pro is an appealing and adaptable player with many potential uses both in the home and on the move. If you're prepared to pay the price for the large display and DVD playback it's a decent enough solution for casual use.