But wait MPIO tell us that their little bundle of fun has new tricks that the others don't have, first thing that's obvious is the 1" OLED screen which in full colour can show MPEG 4, AVI, WMV and Divx video, plus its the window to navigating around your "one". When you delve a little deeper you do find that most files are in fact converted via the MPIO loading application into MP4 to save on space, partly because the One is only available up to 1gb in size.

Lets not give the little One a size complex as MPIO have seen fit to equip this little chap with more toys than Santa's sack starting with a great compatibility for file formats. Apart from the Video capability the MPIO One can handle itself in the audio department with full support for MP3 and our favourite Ogg Vorbis up to Q10, it can also deal with WMA and the DRM (digital right management) wrapped DRM WMA used by online music stores such as Napster. They don't stop there the One can also record audio into WMA format either from the inbuilt FM radio or a microphone.

We really liked the user interface too, the 5 way lever and buttons make easy work of flipping through folders which are all browseable by artist name and album, plus you can associate some images with albums too. Again images can be displayed on the small 96 x 64pixel screen, it's not much of a photo viewer and this really is a gimmick given the diminutive size of the One but JPEG's work fine and BMP and other file formats can be converted by the MPIO desktop application.

Audio playback is particularly impressive with this small bundle of fun making sounds that equalled many of its more expensive hard disk rivals, perhaps the use of the Woolfson 8750 codec seen in many high end devices shows that the smaller outfits like MPIO can play with the big boys. In a blind listening test our trained staff, passing cleaners and other strangers couldn't really tell ay difference between the MPIO sound and that or a 4G iPod when using a set of Sennheiser HD480 headphones.

We did have a play with the Video capability of the One and found that getting some forms of media onto the device was easier than others, MPEG4 was fiddly depending on which codec you had encoded with and WMV seemed to be pretty reliable via the conversion software. Sadly DivX was once again a nightmare with the results juddering and looking very poor, of course the merits of watching video on a 1 inch screen are dubious at best.

Powering the little MPIO One is a lithium polymer battery which gives around 11 hours of audio playback and 2 hours of MP4 replay, this is recharged via the USB 2.0 connector which is also used to fill your One at high speed. Sadly the size of the One and it's 35 gram weight means that MPIO opted for a non replaceable battery meaning a trip back to base should the rechargeable eventually die.

Available in red, blue, silver, black, gold and grey the MPIO One is certainly the most stylish matchbox size MP3 player we've seen since the Mobiblu Cube (all of 2 weeks ago) and in this cramped sector of the market they've done just enough to get our thumbs up. Ranging from £99 for the 256mb version up to £154 for the 1gb version you are paying a price for the reduced size technology which is very apparent when you compare it to £139 for a 4gb iPod mini.

Perhaps MPIO will trim the price which is just a bit too big to fit the small funky style of the MPIO One and while they are at it they can trim the movie on the One's homepage which at 6.5mb is a bit big even for most users one broadband. Amazing how the masters of Bonsai MP3 can get other matters of size so wrong!

Published - 30/08/2005

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