iubi Blue 60GB

While a massive 60GB hard disk is shoved into its reasonably slim, gloss black frame, it’s the 4.7-inch screen that puts iubi’s Blue in the frame.

It's also fairly light at 2.7kg and could be slipped into a pocket, but we’re not sure that’s a good idea. Despite looking good on paper, the Blue will attract almost zero gadget envy. That’s despite picture quality being excellent. Its 480 x 272 pixels give it a higher resolution than most and it plays video for five hours from a full charge.

Every second counts

All-important file compatibility at first impresses, but proves thoroughly irritating in practice. Bizarrely the Blue is happy to take several seconds to find out exactly what video file you’ve hovered over, then refuse to play it.

If you trade mostly in DivX files then there’s no drama, because the Blue can play all versions plus MPEG 1, 2 and 4. What it can't play (without messy and time-consuming transcoding) is older Windows Media Video files (it can only play version 9), Quicktime’s MOV and Real Video, which rules out quite a lot. During our test it also failed to playback H.264 and even MP4.

When it does get going the results are pretty good and keep going for eight hours, although we did notice some wobbly edges and a lack of detail in some footage.

Audio is handled well from both music and movies. Movies, especially, benefit from a powerful Wolfson 3D mode. It does better with music formats, too, by supporting MP3, WMA, WAV, OGG and L- PCM.

Tangled up in Blue

The Blue might be named after its ability to pipe sound to Bluetooth headphones and they’re relatively simple to pair, but there’s only wired ‘phones in the box. Shame.

The unit is left to impress on pure video and music quality because there’s little else here – the user interface is pretty awful. It tries to mimic a mini PC but without a keypad or touch screen it doesn’t stand a chance. Pulling up menus, exiting menus, going back a step – all of this is annoying and confusing.

Without a touch screen the Blue’s messy manual controls seem and unnecessary and its general lack of finesse leaves it seeming a little old hat despite its Bluetooth booty.