I’m not going to involve myself in a lengthy argument on the moral merits of copyrights, and the involvement of MP3 music in various infringements, suffice to say that whatever your stance - MP3 is without doubt a very good thing.

Not only does an MP3 Player give you more flexibility and convenience in what you’re listening to compared to say a CD Player, but it’s much smaller and more effective on the whole. Even Minidisk Players aren’t as convenient to use for your average user, and they do tend to be rather expensive as well. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is if you like using your PC anyway, then an MP3 Player should definitely be your first choice for portable music.

MP3 players come in various shapes and sizes, and hold varying quantities of files, in various ways. Until this little gizmo, Creative’s MP3 Players were of the larger variety, the Jukebox players holding literally thousands of tracks in an expensive looking CD player-style package. The MuVo however, moves in an entirely different direction – away from the mass storage of the chunky Jukebox’s, and into the realms of the tiny, convenient and highly portable.

The MuVo, like that so-small it’s barely visible you got for Christmas, is definitely a gadget to amaze and impress your friends. It’s tiny, and very very convenient. The model I’ve been tinkering with holds 64mb of tracks, about a CDs worth, and is about the size of one of those little cheapy transparent cigarette lighters. It weighs about as much, too.

But this is not where innovation ends, because the MuVo has a unique and rather useful design – it splits in half. This Leaves the USB memory card free to be plugged directly into a free slot on your PC. No messing around with cables here. What’s more, the MuVo’s storage card works exactly in the same way as a removable hard disk, so if you’re running Windows XP you won’t even have to install any drivers to get the music transferring right away.