It's pretty unusual for a relative unknown to come up with a feature that the big names haven't already tried but that's exactly what's happened here.

The Yamada Beat box comes with a pair of stereo speakers built into the main unit, so there's no need to muck about with in-ear headphones or the like.

Simply turn on the player, cue up a tune and force an entire train carriage to listen to your music without having to lug a huge ghetto blaster around with you.

The Beat box is a 512MB player, meaning there's space for around 140 tracks on its sizeable memory. Should you get bored of listening to your vast collection of Abba's back catalogue; you can always switch on the built-in radio and listen to some of the mind-numbing pap they play on Radio 1 these days.

Transferring tracks to the player becomes an absolute breeze thanks to a USB plug that sits underneath the top speaker. The Yamada will play MP3 or WMA tracks and can even encode direct from source so you can record MP3 files direct from the radio or even from records.

There aren't many players that can do that, not even those white ones everyone seems to like so much.