DM Tech AV-10

£289

The lowdown
One of the year’s coolest-looking products is the DM Tech AV-10 personal multimedia player which is being sold in the UK by online retailer Boys Stuff.

Technology seers reckon that pretty soon you’ll be ditching your iPod for a device that not only plays back music but also displays images and videos on its integrated LCD screen. You’ll also be able to record TV programmes on to it for viewing while you are on the move.

What’s good?
This is one of the classiest looking gadgets on sale. It is slim, light and boasts a good 3.5inch LCD screen. It is simple to use too and coped with all the video, image and MP3 music files we threw at it. Recording programmes from the TV was simply matter of running a cable between the two and pressing record.

What’s bad?
Trouble is these devices require large capacity hard disks to store all those huge video files. So we can’t quite work out why DM Tech is offering a player with just 128MB of flash memory – enough space for a rather pathetic 35 minutes of video. You can of course add higher storage cards, but this ramps up the cost to the level of rival hard disk players which have 20 times more storage.

The only other real criticism we could level at it was the lack of an external speaker.

Do you need it?
Now if only it had a hard disk
6/10.

www.boysstuff.co.uk