MSI Megaview 588: Your plastic pal that's fun to be with

With genuine delight Crave today got a chance to play with the MSI MegaView 588 portable multimedia player. This little 20GB hard-disk player player handles MPEG-4 and DivX video, plays your MP3s, allows you to browse photos, and also has a built-in FM radio.

There are several things about his video player we liked right out of the box. It has a clearly labelled volume rocker on the top, and the other controls have a simplicity and ease of use which is one of the few weaknesses of similiar products from Archos.

It's got a handsome, good quality, crisp 89mm (3.5-inch) screen, although in 4:3 format alas, not widescreen. We were impressed by the video playback quality. It has a removable SD card on the top, and it passed the get-it-out-of-the-box-and-plug-it-in test with flying colours. We were able to power it up, connect it via USB to a PC, drag and drop DivX files to the player's folders and start watching video in record time.

A couple of niggles straight away, though: when you power the unit up it has a creepy corporate voice that says, "It's my style -- my style inside..." sounding like a Genuine People Personality device from Sirious Cybernetics. Hmm. The controls also seemed sluggish and the unit hung a few times, but these may just have been gremlins caused by a crazy low battery. This little puppy retails for about £280. We'll let you know how the unit performs in a full review soon. -MP