A while back, I told you guys about an MP5 media player that didn’t seem to do anything more than any other conventional media player. So when I saw this new MP7 player, I tried not to get my hopes up too high for any kind of innovation.

From everything I can tell, this MP7 media player is about on par with every other PMP out there. It’s got a 2.8″ LCD color screen, plays video, audio, tunes FM radio, captures pictures and even has a voice recorder. Big whup. If I’m gonna upgrade my MP3 or MP4 player to an MP7, it had better warp space and time. Or at least slice, dice or make julienne fries.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t look like the case here. Still, if you’re looking for a cheap multimedia player and want to tell your friends that their olde tyme MP3 and MP4 players are for cavemen, you can get your own MP7 player over at eCrater for $70 bucks.

Okay, we’re cheating slightly with this one – it’s not so much a radio, more a palm-sized touchscreen media player that manages to pack an awful lot in, including MP3/WMA/Ogg/FLAC playback, video, photo viewing and SD memory expansion. For our purposes though, how does its intriguing DAB functionality hold up? The D2 tunes in to the digital ether in the same way it picks up FM signals, via the headphone wire – which is great if you’re in a good reception area, but rather warbly and gurgly if you’re not.

It’s also worth noting that this ‘lead receiver’ solution can come a cropper with the ‘fixed station’ nature of DAB compared to fine-tuneable FM, sometimes resulting in complete drop-outs, while hooking it up to an amp via a phono lead can prove more trouble than it’s worth.

Take a stroll outside though, and the clarity improves substantially. Its screen is put to great use in DAB mode by displaying the track details and news headlines broadcast by certain stations, and the overall sound quality when you get a good signal is very pleasing to the ear indeed. DAB die-hards tread carefully then, but casual listeners with heavy on-the-go media demands, you have our blessing…

Well, when it comes to price, it sure is. The 8GB Sanza Fuze costs $129 whereas the all new 8GB iPod Touch goes for $229. Let’s see what Sanza Fuze has to offer minus the touchscreen. The Sandisk Sansa Fuza is a small player, it is size is 1.9 inches thick and has a 220 x 176 pixel resolution. It’s compatible with Audible media files, JPEG, MP3, WAV, and WMA files. So that means that you have no annoying iTunes to deal with. To update the Fuze, a microSD/microSDHC port is placed on the left side for all your images, music, and video transfer. That’s not all; it also has a FM radio and a built-in voice recorder. You can get one (Fuze 2GB) for as cheap as $79.