The IRiver IHP-140 sports a nice big 40gb hard drive which should be plenty for most peoples MP3 collections (including ours) at 1400 hours of music its a capacious little chap and you can use this storage as a portable hard drive too just plug in your USB port and it should be recognised as a mass storage device without driver installation in any OS after win98. But back to the real business of MP3 the main reason you'd buy the IHP-140, the device supports MP3, Windows Media Audio (WMA), ASF, Ogg Vorbis and WAV files (11/22/44KHz, 16bit, Mono/Stereo) and it also support winamp's .m3u format for creating playlists which is handy as you can't make playlists on the device itself although iRiver hope to fix this with an upcoming firmware revision.

Audio replay quality is excellent without having to use the  "out loud effects" which are just a toy that no real audio fan would touch much like the equalizer on an Ipod, there is also a gimmicky SRS 3D sound system, why manufacturers think I want to hear the Beatles in a cave I'm not sure, it doesn't sound like the Cavern club so who do they think is fooled? But with digital optical input and output as well as Analogue in / out you have all your options open when it comes to hooking it up to a HiFi, we found the audio levels to be plentiful and the bass reproduction was good with only a hint of distortion at the upper end of the volume scale, vocals were clear and crisp and the overall impression was a tight punchy sound.

An important issue with a portable MP3 player is battery life but there is no need to worry as the iRiver IHP-140 will run for 16hrs on a full charge although the Li-Polymer battery is not user replaceable which may be a minor concern. Ergonomically the iRiver IHP-140 is like the rest of the range both stylish and functional and all the major controls are in a cluster under the 4 line LCD display or the rather attractive remote control which also sports a blue backlit LCD.

The menu system is easy enough to navigate with tracks browsed by name, artist or album and all the MP3 data is taken from the ID3 tags encoded with the MP3 files, the iRiver supports versions 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 & 4.0 of the ID3 standard tracks are just dragged to the device through windows explorer or you can get plugins for some windows and Mac MP3 applications.

So onto extras, the iRiver has a few gimmicky ones like the ability to read .txt files and an inbuilt FM tuner, but a major extra and one that is really a feature is its direct encode MP3 system, files can be captured via the digital or analogue input to MP3 file ranging from 40kbps up to a maximum of 320mbps, the encoder can also use the inbuilt microphone or an external one to make the IHP-140 a Dictaphone.

iRiver always manage to produce a user friendly device and there this is no exception despite being simple to drive there is a good quality instruction book included in the box and a good deal of backup and drives / firmware on the iRiver website, plus you can even run the IHP-140 in one of 38 languages!

We must admit to wanting to keep our loaner IHP-140, its ruggedised black shell and deep blue backlight certainly win in the fashion stakes and it performs well too providing a worthy companion on the London Underground, perhaps its a tad heavy at 170 grams but that's a niggle.

Overall this has to be a recommended MP3 player it has more features than an Ipod and is better value for money, in terms of user interface its good but not class leading and you won't be embarrassed to be seen with it. If you value the MP3 encode facility then it makes the iRiver IHP-140 one for you.

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