It's great for those times in the summer when you're sitting out in the garden and you want to listen to a track you've not yet added to your player's own memory.

The only catch is that battery life suffers astronomically for every second you leave the wireless switched on. If you stream music with X-Fi switched on, get ready for your battery to die quicker than a kitten in a bucket full of water.

Next we come to the internal speaker. Have you ever wanted a friend to hear the song you're listening to without having to make them use one of your grubby earphones? With the Zen X-Fi, if you unplug your headphones, it'll switch straight to the external speaker so you and those around you will be able to hear the song you're playing.

It goes surprisingly loud, without a hint of distortion. A really great little feature, albeit with the potential to irritate those people travelling on the same bus as you.

And finally we come to the earphones. The sets you usually get with MP3 players (including all previous Zen's, all SanDisk Sansas and all iPods) are universally, unequivocally, undeniably awful.

Not so with this player. The bundled noise isolating earphones certainly are no match for an £80 pair of Shure earphones. But still, they're light-years better than anything we've seen come bundled with an MP3 player before.

So far then, this review has been overwhelmingly positive. And it's actually hard to find something to complain about.

The only real problem we have is the interface, which is a bit fiddly. The buttons on the front are rather cumbersome and the on/off/hold switch is curiously hidden away on the back which is surprisingly inconvenient.

But really, this is a great MP3 player. It's very light, and it's even got an SD card expansion slot which enables you to boost the 16GB of internal memory (also available in 8GB and 32GB - the 8GB version does not have Wi-Fi built in).

Finally we have a good MP3 player which holds sound quality as the most important feature. Something we've been waiting on for years. And even after the long wait, it's certainly no disappointment.