Getting our paws on a SBeat was a bit of a treat, the construction is very rugged and when clutching it in your palm it feels so well built you'd happily use its tools to hack away at something without being too concerned for the MP3 innards. Inside our review model is the smallest disk available a whopping 1gb of USB storage.

The Swiss Sbeat's interface is very similar to other small USB MP3 players, despite its small controls its easy enough to drive with the major controls to hand. Plus the S.Beat comes with a tiny remote control which sits inline to your headphones. The screen is a bight and very clear 3 line display which operates in reverse giving bright white text on a dark blue / black background.

Getting audio files onto your S.Beat is Childs play as the disk looks like a lump of USB 2.0 mass storage and you can simply drag and drop files or folder across onto the player and it's compatible with both Windows 2000/XP and Mac 0S X Version 10.2 and above. The supported file formats include MP3, WAV, Ogg Vorbis and WMA meaning that any boy Scout with this MP3 knife will be able to handle all the commonly used formats with the exception of the Apple ACC format.

The little remote means you can keep the S.Beat clipped to your belt or in a pocket out of sight while the strangely Swiss looking controls clip to a lapel. A nice feature although one unlikely to be used by a geek carrying an MP3 penknife is the ability to plug 2 sets of headphones into the remote and share your music. Shared or not the audio quality is good and our tests with Ogg Vorbis encoded files sounded great even on the standard headphones, the bass became much fuller when we switched to the Shure E2c's and proved that electronically the Swiss Memory unit is up there with the best in this price bracket.

Lets not forget that there are also a few extras with the S.Beat, there is both an FM radio with 15 presets and also a voice recorder so you can record up to 48kbit voice memos or from the FM radio or line input. Quite what sort of memo you'd make while hacking at something with the knife blade is beyond us?

When it comes to the Knife features the S.Beat is a trusty and reliable Swiss army knife. The main blade is sharp enough to make light work of most campsite tasks, the nail file is, well a nail file and the scissors are ok but not good for trimming fingernails!  Given the recent increase in flight security since 9/11 Swiss Memory do offer a flight safe version, which is basically the outer shell without the tools. Optionally you could just remove the MP3 centre and leave the knife in your main baggage as they do supply a little cap for the USB connector when out of its protective casing.

Battery life is a bit of a disappointment giving only 8 hours replay from a charge, sure you can top up from any USB port and the Lithium Ion battery doesn't suffer the memory effect but we'd expect a bit more listening time from a USB player these days.

Overall we have to say that we are impressed with what we feared would just be a gimmick or boys toy. Instead the SwissBit S.Beat is a useable MP3 player with varying memory options up to an iPod Nano equalling 4gb, it's likely to turn heads wherever you use it be it at work or on Scout camp!

Published - 19/02/2006

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