First the similarities with the ever popular Ipod Mini, the creative Zen micro is also available in arrange of colours there are 10 to choose from, the micro supports MP3 files of up to 320kbps as well as WAV and WMA files, size wise its on a par with the Ipod mini perhaps a bit shorter and only a little heavier that the featherweight mini.

Much to our surprise that's where the comparison started to throw up the differences, firstly the Zen Micro has 5gb of disk space compared to the Ipods 4gb, the battery ran for 12 hours compared to us eeeking a meagre 10 hours out of the apple unit, plus the Zen micros battery is user replaceable and its very very easy to do making it possible to have a second battery on hand to double potential time between charges.

Driving the micro is a pleasure the touch pad device which is similar to the one used on the Zen touch 24 has a linear track for scrolling up and down lists this seems more natural that the click wheel favoured by apple and while its clearly influenced by the apple user interface the Zen is better. The controls are clear and large with the backlight making the buttons glow gently in the dark, the 160 x 104 pixel resolution, blue EL backlit LCD really looks cool and is easy to read even in the good old direct sunlight test!

A nice touch is the ability to choose which items are on the first menu, so you can bring forward features you use most frequently to the start of the user interface, we've seen this on mobile phones and thought it to be a good idea and it really works well on the Zen Micro.

Audio quality is stunning, with a class leading signal to noise ratio of 98db the clarity of the recorded files is without doubt among the best we've heard and it almost drives you against the point of a micro device in that you want to rip all your music at a higher bit rate to make the most of the creative audio capabilities. Perhaps Ogg Vorbis support might have been a trick here to allow files of 128kbps to sound that bit better than using standard layer 3 MP3 audio.

The headphones supplied are passable, but that about as kind as we can be, they are claimed to have good bass reproduction but we can't agree but when paired with a set of Shure E2C's the Zen Micro really shone as a sonically superb bit of kit. There are extras too, the micro packs an FM radio with 32 presets for when you exhaust your 5gb music store and this can be recorded directly to MP3 should you want some hissy FM recordings of capital FM.

Other extras are quite cool, there is the voice record feature and also a synchronisation package which can take contacts, to do items and calendar appointments from MS outlook and make them available on your micro, this works really well and could see the end of a few low end PDA's! The USB 2.0 connection makes for a faster upload time for new files but don't fret if your PC is still USB 1.1 its backwardly compatible.

Creative have taken some features from the bigger hard disk units within the range and applied them to their new baby, the rather excellent shuffle facility appear here, this is not just a straight random play you can specify for it to play only recently accessed or most popular tracks in the shuffle, or even ask for a random album each day. The sleep timer we liked so much has also made it here so you can conceivably use the Zen Micro to wake you up with your choice of MP3 each day.

So technically this is a real cracker and style wise? well we really like it, the rounded edges, blue backlight and particularly the light blue, red and orange cases look very cool indeed, it feels good in the hand too and well built so no grumbles there and a good sign that you won't need to use the one year warranty.

Its pitched at exactly the same spot as the Ipod Mini and at £139.99 the Creative Zen Micro is cheaper than  its counterpart and in every department you get more, more disk space, more features, more colours, more battery life in fact much like the madness track we were listening too its one step beyond! and a must buy.

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