An "ultra-compact, ultra-desirable fashion accessory" is how the marketing people at Creative Labs describe the Zen Nano Plus: a somewhat breathless statement with a distinctly gratuitous use of the prefix "ultra" in my humble opinion. So let's put marketing babble to one side for a moment and look at the Zen Nano Plus from a more critical point of view.

Cradled in the palm of your hand, the Zen Nano Plus is certainly on the small side - whether this can be reasonably described as "ultra-compact" or just plain old "compact" I'll leave you to decide. Certainly it's not much bigger than a Zippo lighter and its weight without battery is only a few grams - you're not going to feel like your lugging this around, that's for sure. First impressions are reasonable though: it looks well constructed, albeit from plastic and it should be immediately obvious which buttons do what at the outset, what with them being labelled and everything.

Ok, so we've got the battery in, time to start her up and see what she'll do. Hold the power button in for a few seconds and she'll spring to life. The LCD screen is small, but perfectly clear and lit by a cool blue backlight. If you've got the headphones in a smarmy employee of Creative Labs will start to tell you what a terrific purchase you've made. You'll want to delete this track almost immediately but at least you know it works and at least you know the sound quality seems reasonable.

Now you'll want to get some of your music on to the Nano.

1. It HAD to use AA or AAA batteries.
2. I could "drag and drop" MP3s using Windows Explorer.

1. I'll be damned to an eternity in Hell before I pay the manufacturer of any electronic device a vast sum of money for a replacement battery, ever.

There were other caveats of course, but they weren't quite as overriding as the above, one of these was of course that it had to play MP3s natively and not try to convince me to convert my beautiful collection into something atrocious like, oh, say, ATRAC. "But it's more efficient!" They whine. "Buddy, you've got too much time on your hands," I reply. Oh yes,and let's not forget that there's no attempt to tie you to some ludicrous Digital Rights Management (DRM) music store: I'm not a thief or a pirate. I refuse to be treated like one.

Sure enough, plugging the Nano into a spare USB2 socket resulted in Windows recognising the Nano as a removable drive and in a few minutes (I didn't time it, but it was no more than 'a few'.) I had 144 MP3s all transferred across with room to spare for plenty more. HINT1: You will want to organise your MP3s into folders as it makes navigating in the Nano a piece of cake but you'll discover that for yourself in time. HINT2: You probably won't need the software or drivers if your using Windows 2000 or XP and if you're not using DRM Protected WMA files (it plays standard WMA files natively)

If you ever got bored listening to MP3s there's always the built in FM tuner to keep you occupied. The unit found all the available FM transmissions in its scan and the reception is pretty good considering I live in a veritable radio wave black hole, where it's impossible to listen to anything other than FM without a thunderpole the size of blackpool tower.

Next up is the line in port and a nice addition in my opinion. I can see occasion where maybe a friend has a great song on his MP3 player that I just have to have, one quick connection later and it's transferred across as an MP3 at a bitrate of 128kbps - not that I would ever recommend you do this with copyrighted songs - I'm talking about songs my friends' band has recorded - hope that's crystal clear (and not remotely sarcastic)?