When someone's innovative enough to come up with a new spin on a product in a market as saturated as MP3 players, it's usually not long before a flurry of rivals follow suit. But this hasn't really been the case with the iPod Shuffle, the micro-sized, low-capacity, screen-less player that's aimed at people who put portability at a premium.

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Creative has now released the first significant rival, in the shape of the Zen Stone, retaining the design ethos from its successful V/V+ series of players in a choice of six different colours.

As expected, it's extremely small and light, similar in dimensions to the Shuffle, has 1GB capacity and sacrifices an LCD display to achieve its diminutive size. Our initial reaction is that Creative could perhaps have made it even smaller - the device feels quite hollow and weighs even less than you'd think - but at this point we're wondering how small such a product could be before it becomes unusable (and very easy to lose!).