Our final player is a 128MB memory key from Philips, and in many ways it is a direct competitor to the Creative MuVo. The most obvious difference is that the Philips KEY005 is a single piece of hardware that plugs directly into a USB port on your PC, both to transfer music files and also to charge the internal Li-Ion battery.

You get about five hours of playback time from a single charge which is more than enough to play the couple of CDs that it can store, but Philips isn't sure that's enough time so it has provided an external battery pack that houses an AAA cell. This is very considerate but it detracts from the looks of the player and that is almost a criminal act as it is such an attractively styled piece of hardware.

Music transfer is accomplished using either the supplied copy of Musicmatch Jukebox or simply by dragging and dropping files in Windows Explorer. With a list price of £99 and a street price of £79 this is an expensive player when compared with the likes of the MuVo or memory key players from other manufacturers, but that's not really the point. To our mind you're paying a premium, but in return you get a very stylish piece of kit.

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Later this year Philips will refresh the KEY product range and will add KEY013 which has 256MB of storage and a small display at a price of £149, and also KEY015 which has 512MB, a display and a price of £179.

We'll have to see how the street prices work out, but the bigger players seem unlikely to prove more attractive than the 2GB HDD070, while KEY005 is tempting, but just that bit too expensive. It does, however, look very good indeed.