Creative were one of those involved in the MP3 arms race with their Zen Jukebox and as hostilities commence in the video area Creative are back with the Portable Media centre or PMC.

The Creative Portable Media Centre (PMC) is in essence a large hard drive with both audio and video storage and replay capacities and large is a word which adequately described the Creative PMC, unlike the Archos Gmini 400 the Creative PMC is a bit of a beast, dreams of carrying all your movies with you should be accompanied by visions of large biceps.

In a kind of black plastic that's trying to look expensive the Creative Portable Media Centre is a bit of a sheep in wolves clothing, the unit relies entirely on Microsoft's windows media player 10 for audio and video replay and the Microsoft portable OS to give it the guts to run an and the look and feel. In fairness this is a good decision as many products fail miserably on the user interface and Mr Gates boys have had a fair few years of honing their interface to get it right.

Driving the Creative PMC is a strangely familiar experience the menu contains folders such as "my music" and "my video" and within minutes you'll be scooting around the 20gb hard drive and placing your files in their correct home. During replay you get the full album art and you can also navigate by this method which we found very useful, in fact one of the best features of the creative PMC is the hot sync with windows media player on your PC, you can choose which media you wish to bring across and then sit back as the USB 2.0 connection quickly fills up the drive.

Sadly WM10 is not really the best engine for MP3 replay and the hardware didn't perform sonically, perhaps the signal to noise ratio of only 90dB is a good indication that this is not a pure audio device and that its standards are set to be good enough to accompany the images displayed on the 3'8 inch 320 x 240 pixel screen.

The unit seems to have enough legs to cope with the bulk of a windows OS, the 400Mhx XScale processor makes easy work of the interface even when decoding full screen video

Perhaps the biggest flaw (apart from its size) is the inability to get video into the device, WM10 will only play WM video files so almost everything you rip will need to be transcoded, of course this allows you to drop the bit rate but it is a real pain and with no direct record (like the Archos) file transfer is the only way to get media onto your PMC.

Battery life is good with a claimed 22 hours for audio and a proven 7 hours for video, of course with a device this big its entirely possible they have hidden a lead acid car battery inside the rear flap.

Priced at £330 its on a par with the iRiver PMP 120 which we tested a while back, but even though we had some criticisms of the PMP120 its better than creative first effort, in its simplest form the Creative portable media centre is a) not portable it doesn't even come close to fitting in a pocket and b) too picky about what it will and won't play without conversion.

It is a good first stab but the forthcoming Archos Gmini 400 looks like better bet for real portable video and audio fun.

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