You can more or less sum up the portable music player market with two categories: Apple and everyone else. And everyone else has its sights squarely set on Apple.

Samsung's chosen to take a crack at the title with the fairly unfunkily named YP-Z5, which runs head to head with the iPod nano. Both players come in 1 GB, 2 GB and 4 GB sizes and sport similar dimensions, though the YP-Z5 is a little thicker. But they're both light and inoffensive pocket-dwellers.

The YP-Z5 does have a couple of superior features to the nano, including its bigger colour screen. This makes the menu system a little easier to read, and also allows you to view JPEG pictures – although they're still squintily small. The other nano-beating feature is the battery life, with it packing 35 hours of non-stop music compared to the nano's 14 hours.

On the other hand, the YP-Z5 doesn't quite match the nano when it comes to its user interface. Samsung even snaffled ex-Apple designer Paul Mercer to work on the interface, with mixed results. The screen is nice and clear, but the touchpad used for scrolling is fickle at best, irritating at worst.

Still, for a non-Apple portable audio player, the YP-Z5 is impressive, but can't quite trump Apple in terms of style and panache.