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Then there’s the fabulously labelled ‘E-Book’ section, which is just a plain text viewer. However, you have to scroll through your document from left to right, which renders it perfectly unusable.

The FM function is a useful addition but it didn’t sound particularly good, with plenty of interference when tested outside of the TR offices, whereas other radios I’ve tried have been crackle free.

As for sound quality, the MSI is perfectly listenable, particularly on a good pair of headphones and the EQ button is at least easily accessible, should you wish to shape your music sound. Surprisingly the supplied headphones are quite decent. The cord is braided and housed inside a plastic tube and feels quite strong. There a chord for attaching to the player and a sliding fastener for keeping the headphones chord slack tidy. They sound reasonable too but things will obviously sound even better if you use a better set.

Getting music onto the player is straightforward – it’s just drag and drop, and the player can read files in the root folder too. You can move between folders by pressing the ‘M’ button and moving up and down and selecting, or by double pressing on the skip function to move between folders. It’s clunky and slightly painful, but once you get the hang of it, it works. Another oddity is the ability to increase the tempo of tracks but it introduced distortion if pushed to fast.

Other things that particularly bothered me while using the player though was the slight electronic noise that occurred whenever you start to play a track and the fact that when you press pause, the track fades in and out, a ‘feature’ that I couldn’t find a way of turning off. The player was also very sluggish to respond as times, which meant that I often made multiple presses and essentially lost control of what was happening.

This player might have a long feature list but this isn't necessarily something worth celebrating. Navigation is difficult, the buttons have a poor feel and there’s no direct USB connector. And when it comes down to it, the screen is in fact more of a hindrance than a bonus.

Verdict

Overall, the Digi Player is a good example of feature bloat gone mad. MSI has chucked everything at it without nearly enough thought going into usability. When I see a product like this I can only think that MSI should stick to what it knows best, such as motherboards and graphics cards and leave branded consumer electronics to the experts. As an MSI MP3 Player it’s a failure and only serves as the best advert for an iPod shuffle that Apple could have hoped for.

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