While all the excitement surrounds the Rio Carbon, we prefer to look at the jewel in the recent announcements the new Rio Forge, while the carbon takes on apples Ipod Mini (a battle it's unlikely to win) the Rio Forge has a much wider goal to take aim at.

Flash based players like the Forge are good for a number of mobile situations like while exercising or for those who want an MP3 player but don't need to carry their entire collection with them and therefore pay for this additional storage.

As the Forge doesn't need a hard disk it can more easily be styled to suit a certain market and Rio have directly pitched this baby at the sports / outdoor crowd, surrounded by a rubber protective edge the forge has a stainless steel faceplate which adds that all important touch of class.

Rio are making 3 sizes of forge for the September 2004 UK launch date, they are  128mb, 256md and 512mb versions each in a different colour with the 256mb in steel grey and the 512mb in deep blue looking the best, filling up your new Rio is quicker than in previous models as the new forge uses USB 2.0 for upload speeds 4 times faster than the old models and as before the unit is OS agnostic working with Mac or PC.

battery life for this mini player is excellent with a reported 20 hours playback from the single AAA battery even with liberal use of the simple but stunning LCD display, Rio have made an equally effective job with the navigation structure enable one handed use which is essential if you are trying to change tracks while at the Gym.

To add to its sporty pretensions the Forge features a working stopwatch and lap time alongside a sports armband to keep your pride and joy clamped to a sweaty arm, should you run so much that you manage to listen to all of the 16 hours of music you can always add further storage through the onboard SD or MMC slot which can enable the Forge to stretch its total capacity to over 1.5gb.

There is an FM tuner  within the device which can also be recorded to the Rio's memory for later playback, the kit comes with sports clip headphones, case and armband.

So what are the downsides, well only one and that is lack of support for Ogg Vorbis, sadly it seems that Rio have decided to opt for MP3 and WMA adding weight to Microsoft's driver towards digital rights management, it's a shame as the Rio Nitrus with Ogg Vorbis is an excellent device.

Starting at £109 the Rio Forge range is keenly priced and seems well placed to attack this end of the MP3 player market.

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