It even has a voice recorder.Sound quality is excellent and it’s easy to navigate – you can bin the manual. Being super slimline, it slides easily into your pocket, but still manages to pack one gigabyte more storage than its Mini rival, offering up to 80 hours of music. The claimed battery life is twice as long – up to an impressive 20 hours of listening time. However, Rio’s latest MP3 player is definitely worth consideration.

As the name implies, the Carbon has a metallic finish with a highly polished back (not unlike the iPod). It looks and feels gorgeous, and fits perfectly in the palm of your hand. But this is fairly standard on digital cameras today and the video store – a Secure Digital memory card – limits how much footage you can record. The camera mode takes pretty decent 4-megal pixel snaps with an impressive 10x optical zoom, but there are far more compact and cheaper cameras.As with all Pentax models, the MX4 is simple to use. But it’s too cumbersome for a compact, and doesn’t provide enough memory or sufficient quality recordings to be a serious contender.Rio Carbon 5GB, £199, 020 7744 0802; With all the hype surrounding the Apple’s iPod Mini, it is easy to overlook the competition. So far it hasn’t missed a trick and my conscience and license have remained delightfully clean.

But would I pay £400 for the privilege? Maybe I’ll just stick to the speed limits instead.Pentax Optio MX4, £369.99, 01753 79279; most of us, the MX4 seems unsure what it wants to be when it grows up. The “gun-grip” handle resembles an old cine camera, but it can record MPEG4 video with 640 x 480 pixels at 30 frames per second. However, its blue glow as it sits on your dashboard is an open invitation to passing thieves, so you need to take it out (strangely, you can’t turn it off) and re-install it each day.Regular updates via your PC are required to ensure it has all the latest road information, for which you pay a yearly subscription (from £49), though the first six months are free. But for those with short attention spans, hectic social lives or weak bladders, this is a great buy.Road Angel, £400, 01327 855586; The one thing I hate more than boy racers is getting points on my licence for going four miles an hour over the speed limit. So I jumped at the chance of trying out the new Road Angel, which warns of imminent speed cameras and police laser guns using visual, audible and voice alerts. It works straight out of the box, and uses GPS signals to locate your position and check for cameras.

However, the sound quality is tinny, and there are no options to change treble or bass. Return and hit ‘play’ and you won’t have missed a word – and you can then fast-forward through the adverts. Maximum pause time is 10 minutes (it bleeps a warning 30 seconds beforehand) and you can also rewind a programme by the same amount to hear a song or soundbite again.It’s simple to use, with functions just like a CD player. Robert Scoble can put what he wants on to his phone’s 512MB of flash memory, and play it back as much as he likes. Why should the future be more locked down?Just as with other digital-music players, we will demand the ability to choose how and how often we listen to our content – whether it’s music, spoken word, or something we’ve created ourselves.

After all, text messages flourished not because the phone makers focused hard on them, but precisely because they ignored them. As long as they leave the huge storage on upcoming phones alone, they’ll see sparkling results. But to try to determine how we listen to what we choose – well, that’s the surest way to kill the golden goose of music. Philips 755 Tag-It, £99 (prepay), 0870 900 9070;

Philips 755 Tag-It, £99 (prepay), 0870 900 9070;
Philips’ latest mobile phone is a thinly veiled attempt to get down with the kids.