The Sanyo HDP M3000 may worry some buyers purely by the fact it's quite cheap, so lets get that out of the way right now, it's £99, no need to worry perhaps just think of it as efficient it sounds much better. Measuring 90 x 58 x 20mm the HDP M3000 is small and yet quite well built, the unit is relatively lightweight at just 87 grams and yet it all feels like a package that costs more then it's retails price. The finish in cool silver and white is quite classy and doesn't look at all cheap, the screen is a good size with a strong backlight and reasonable resolution allowing it to display graphics as well as full lines of text.

Navigating your way round the Sanyo is limited yet simple, you can browse up to the maximum number of supported folder (250) and sort them by Artist, Album or  Genre. The touch dial system may seem like a rip off of Apples click wheel but it really isn't nor does it perform as well, but we mustn't be too harsh it does provide a logical way around your music collection and combined with intuitive menu options it works well. We did find that getting between some menus can be a bit sluggish and can lead to double presses on command keys while you are waiting for the screen to refresh.

The HDP M3000 supports both MP3 and windows WMA format, the latter can be DRM (digital rights management) protected meaning that you can use tracks purchased legally from online stores. Audio quality was really quite good and to our ears on a par with the new iPod Nano, the bass delivered is sufficient especially when using some good earphones (we tested with Shure E2C's) and the mid range sound vibrant and warm. There is little hiss or other extraneous noise from the device and no hard drive noise that we could detect, overall a good sonic performance and certainly plenty good enough for our MP3's encoded at 192kbits.

Getting your music onto the HDP-M3000 is achieved via a mini USB port and is relatively speedy although filling up the whole 6gb (1500 tracks) can take a long cup of tea! The supplied software isn't the best but does enable you to easily copy media onto the drive, the upside of this is it doesn't need to index your collection and therefore does no harm to any other music applications living on your PC. It is also possible to use the 6gb drive as a USB mass storage device as windows just sees it as a disk, normally we'd scoff at this but this isn't  a bad price for a 6gb portable drive let alone an MP3 player!

The USB is also used to top up the internal battery which we managed to make last for just under 12 hours, a realistic expectation is 11 hours and the full charge seemed to take around 4 hours from flat. Sanyo do offer an external charge as an optional extra in case you want to charge the unit from the mains power supply but USB with any equipped device works fine, we like this because it's easy to keep it topped up while at work.

The package you get for £99 is limited with just the unit, USB cable, cheap headphones and the software, but that's all you need to get the most from the Sanyo. We have to admit to being quite impressed with the HDP M3000, it's not got the out and out style / sex appeal of the iPod Nano or a new Sony network Walkman but it is a reliable good sounding player which is at least £70 cheaper.

Sanyo have set out to challenge Sony and Apple with this entry to the mass MP3 player market, we expected them to make this assault purely on price, but after a week with the M3000 we are pleased to report it's a far more serious attack.

Published - 22/11/2005

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