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The first thing that hits you about the Aigo P880 is the packaging that it ships in. I remember when I bought an Apple iPod for my wife and how cool I thought the box was, but even Apple could learn a thing or two from Aigo.

The Aigo P880 ships in a solid black box that’s secured with magnetic catches. The box opens up into two halves – one houses the P880 player, while the other holds all the accessories. There’s an air of quality about the packaging, and I couldn’t see myself ever wanting to throw the box away if I bought an Aigo player. But as the old saying goes, you can’t judge a book by its cover and it takes more than flashy packaging to make a great digital music player.

In the box you get a shiny black cradle that matches the player and a power supply to charge the device – the player and the cradle both have the same connector at the bottom so that the power supply can be used via the cradle or connected directly to the player. However, it’s here that the P880 runs into its first problem. Bizarrely, the docking cradle has no USB connectivity – it’s there purely to supply power to the player and has the added bonus of a line-out socket in case you wanted to pump music to your hi-fi.

The lack of USB connectivity in the cradle is a real shame, since this means that even when the P880 is resting in the cradle, you will need to have a USB cable plugged into the top of it as well. I can’t understand why Aigo chose to do things this way, since pretty much every digital audio player that I’ve used both charges and connects to your computer through the cradle. On the plus side, the P880 will charge over USB, so you can still connect it to your PC and charge it at the same time. But this does mean that your PC needs to stay on in order for it to charge the device.

Also in the box is a mini-USB to USB cable, a mini-USB to USB converter and surprisingly, some ferrite collars – it’s been a while since I’ve seen ferrite collars supplied with a device, but the idea is that they will help maintain a clean signal through the cable that they’re attached to. There’s also a PVC carrying case supplied, complete with belt clip – unfortunately, the screen is hidden, as are the controls, so you’ll have to take the P880 out whenever you want to adjust anything. To be fair though, the case that ships with the Apple iPod is no different.

There’s a set of black headphones with an in-line remote control. There’s no display on the remote, and the controls on offer are play/pause, skip forward/back and volume up/down. Now, although I’d never really advise anyone to use the headphones that ship with an MP3 player, it’s always worth seeing what kind of quality the manufacturer is bundling. Unfortunately for Aigo, the ear-buds that come with the P880 are far from impressive, and really don’t show the player off to best effect.

The P880 is a 20GB device that will playback both MP3 and WMA files, but it also has a few tricks up its sleeve. First and foremost is the superb 2in colour screen, which is the best example I have ever seen on a device like this. The reason that Aigo has integrated such an impressive screen is that the P880 can also be used as a photo viewer.

I know what you’re thinking – Aigo is just copying Apple with its iPod Photo, but you’d be wrong, because the P880 is a more versatile product than the iPod when it comes to image viewing. With the iPod Photo, all your images have to be transferred to the device while it is connected to your computer, and you can offload your digital images to the P880 in exactly the same way. However, one thing that sets the P880 above the iPod photo is that it has an SD card slot.

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