Needing a USB drive I couldn’t resist buying the catchily named Sumvision M18 – a 4Gb memory stick MP3 player, voice recorder and FM radio costing around £30. While it’s labelled “USB 2.0” the speed of data transfers on it is dreadful (7 minutes to transfer a 160Mb file). It’s much too slow to run portable applications off of it as I’d hoped to, and it’s a hassle if you want to change the music or other files on it regularly. If all you want is to use it as an MP3 player and radio though I guess it’s OK, and the price is certainly right, but the user interface is extremely un-friendly to the point that about the only way to use it is like an iPod shuffle (“just give me a random next track”).
By contrast the iPod nano I bought before has not been without problems and was much more expensive for fewer features but is one of my favourite devices – what it does, it does very well.
