Creative is showing Apple the way forward in Europe by shipping its 4GB MuVo² (MuVo Squared) MP3 player, where Apple has failed miserably to supply the mini iPod outside of North America.

This 4GB hard drive player is only slightly larger than the 256MB BenQ 150, and it falls into a sort of limbo in terms of its capacity. You can fit around fifty CDs worth of music onto the MuVo², which is a decent part of the typical person's collection, but it certainly won't be all of your music, or even the majority of it.

That means you'll have to choose which music you transfer to your player, unlike a 20GB player where you can probably select your entire library. It also means that you'll have to be able to navigate around the contents of your player as 4GB is a great deal of music, and this is where we hit a problem.

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Creative supplies the same Mediasource software that you get with an Audigy sound card, and it's not very good. The main problem is that it ignores ID3 tags and lists tracks alphabetically, which is a pain, but there is another factor as Creative is fully behind the drive to prevent music piracy. This is laudable, of course, but it can be irritating when your music is flagged as copy protected and you can't then transfer it from your MuVo² to another PC.

The ergonomics of the MuVo² are adequate, but no more than that. The screen displays two fairly small lines of text, while the main four-way control pad is a bit fiddly. The rechargeable AA-sized battery has a claimed life of 14 hours of playback, but you are more likely to get ten hours of use in the real world before you have to plug in the charging cable.

As you would expect from a company of Creative's pedigree, audio quality is very good, but that doesn't make up for the awkward file handling.