The EMP-500 really stands our due to it's STN 4096 colour Display which can handle both scrolling text and pictures, the 82 x 39 x 21mm 35 gram device looks like something quite special with it's screen at full brightness looming out from the sleek aluminium body.

Gone is the familiar Xen wheel and in comes an easier to use joystick below the screen, this is the main method of driving EZAV's new addition and the enhanced screen makes a huge difference to the overall experience. The joystick will be welcomed by the mobile phone generation who will find it's simple one thumb operations and push to select just like driving any one of countless mobiles.

The Xen range now embraces a number of codecs including our favourite Ogg Vorbis, this allows for greater compression without sacrificing audio quality too much, but perhaps the real selling point of the 500 is the DRM support from WMA. So many MP3 players hit the market with a complete disregard for digital rights management and it's great to see a multi codec player with full DRM for the Microsoft format allowing users to play their legally downloaded files. The full list of supported formats (MPEG 1/2/2.5/3 Layer 3, WMA, ASF, OGG) leaves little for us to moan about apart from their choice to only give the unit USB 1.1 support thus reducing the transfer speed from PC to the device.

The selection of the STN screen paves the way for the EMP-500 to show video clip's and still images and in a limited way DV files can be shown which is a nice touch but nothing to excited about even if you have plumped for the larger 1gb unit.

A 15 hour battery life is neither stunning or poor its very much middle of the road and the choice of AAA batteries to power the Xen rather than a rechargeable lithium ion jobby, this does mean that the price is kept low at around £100 for the 512mb version.

Extras are there in abundance, the Xen EMP-500 has the ability to encode MP3 tracks from either the line input, FM radio or the inbuilt microphone which also has voice activation. The FM tuner uses the supplied headphones as the aerial and offers a backup should you exhaust the 240 tracks that the 1gb model can hold. Of course the player can also function as a USB store and in being connected to a host PC it can have its firmware upgraded, again it's not limited to just the PC as there is support for a number of operating systems including Win 98 SE / ME / 2000 / XP and Mac OS 9.2 /10.2.

Audio quality is good with reasonable bass reproduction utilising the bass boost feature and the high level 40mW output, while it's not the clearest sound it works well and is suited to more pop and jock than jazz and classical tracks.

The supplied software does the job of filling up Xen's 1gb baby and it also enables a hook up to the web where album images can be pushed to the 500 allowing it to use these both during track replay and also when browsing your music collection.

Overall we remain impressed with EZAV's efforts with the Xen EMP-500, the design is a bit like those metallic glasses cases and it feels very sturdy in the hand, the screen is very attractive and easy to use and the navigation is also quite easy to drive. It does cost more than an Ipod shuffle but you get many many more features, like the Ogg Vorbis support and more importantly windows media DRM.

Published - 15/05/2005

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