So what exactly does £229.99 get you, well for a start there is a 40gb hard drive at the heart of the GPDR40 this can be used to hold a wide range of supported multimedia formats from MPEG-4, AVI and ASF video to MP3 audio and JPEG images. The unit measures 110 x 80 x 30mm and tips the scales at a pocket bulging 290 grams when both batteries are fitted, in terms of style the Goodmans GPDR40 is a mix of portable media player chic and 80's portable telly.

Goodmans maintain that this is a portable device that sits in the pocket, well after filling our fleece pockets with the GPDR40 we reached the conclusion that their pockets must be much bigger than ours, only a TomTom go unit makes your pocket stick out more and we only do that to get it from the car to the office.

The main controls are situated to the right of the screen and the menu button takes you through to the majority of configurable options, the whole thing has a widows look and feel but then that is not surprising as it is based around windows media centre software, the only thing that points to its Goodmans roots is the rather tacky volume control on an 80's spin dial...nice.

Onwards to the benefits of the GPDR40, the 3.6" colour screen has a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels but the video codec can support VGA resolution recording and playback although this will limit the device to about 30 hours of video storage at this bit rate. So we get to supported video formats, ideally you will need MPEG-4 files for playback on the Goodmans device, they claim in built compatibility but in truth you will need to use the supplied software bundle to transcode your Divx and other files to MPEG-4 a process that seemed to take double real time even on our 3.06ghz machine.

Playback once the file had been squirted via USB 2.0 top the device was stable and jitter free and when using the higher quality setting the images seem sharp and colourful on the GPDR40's screen, use the SCART connection to hook up to a TV or LCD screen and you'll see the compression artefacts but we wont stress over that as most users would not buy such a device for that purpose.

The other way to get media onto the device is to record via the SCART lead, although this is highly manual and nothing like operating a sky plus box it is a good method for populating your 40gb drive, however we did have some issues with audio sync using this method and files captured like this seem to drift in and out of sync.

Hopefully these issues can be dealt with during future firmware upgrades which is a benefit of having a software based codec and device code, the PVR console software you load onto the host PC makes this process possible and also allows the transfer of media and management of device settings. The 40gb drive can be mounted on any plug and play PC as a mass storage device via the USB 2.0 connection and the inbuilt SD / MMC card reader can also be deployed to backup or empty memory cards from digital cameras or other devices.

Audio playback was disappointing, firstly the sound quality of our MP3's was not up to scratch, this surprised us as a multimedia device is nothing without good sound, also the audio level does not seem to go high enough when using headphones, despite turning all the controls up full background noise of any significant level defeats the GPDR40. So not a good companion for the tube then? well no given the low battery life of just 2.5 hours when playing full screen video, we managed longer with audio but this is a poor performance for the device which comes with a lithium Ion battery.

Other extras include a pre loaded application to sync appointments form outlook on the host pc to the device where they can then be viewed, there is also a voice recording capability which records in .wav format.

Overall we found the Goodmans GPDR40 a disappointing device to review, we can excuse the build quality not being the same as Apples standards and iRiver would never have exposed screws but when all but one of the listed video formats are supported via transocde to MPEG-4 you start to get a little cheesed off.

Battery life is not great and the audio quality and level are hardly impressive, we like the overall layout and even the 80's edgy styling grows on you, image resolution although poor on paper looks fine on the device and the memory card interface is a great idea.

However even at £229 we expect a device to perform its basic functions, budget does not mean some features may perform poorly it should just mean less features, Goodmans attempt at the portable media player tries to be jack of all trades but ends up master almost none.

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