Product: Archos Gmini 120 Price: $2,500 Pros: Small, tough, portable storage and music system with display Cons: Monochrome display does not support viewing photos
Portable storage is one of the most uninspiring and commoditised fields in the whole information technology industry. But over the past year, Archos has achieved the feat of making it interesting.
The company's product range includes compact hard drives and portable video recorders, radios, cameras and music players, all of which are built in hardy cases for maximum protection against drops.
The Archos Gmini 120 continues this tradition. Billed as 'a modular MP3 player', it is a lot more than yet another wannabe iPod.
The Gmini is actually a 20-gigabyte hard drive with a pile of handy features. Along with the basic MP3, wav and WMA player, you get a built-in microphone for stereo audio recording, direct to MP3, at a choice of 32 kilobits to 192 kilobits per second. External microphones are also supported.
You can also buy an adaptor that turns the Gmini into an FM radio, and record radio shows direct to MP3.