The Toshiba Gigabeat V is the much awaited upgrade to the very successful Toshiba Gigabeat S model, and has further strengthened the profile of Toshiba in the portable media market place. This device offers a vast array of media functions including, digital audio player, photo viewer, and video player. The Toshiba Gigabeat V has dimension of 3 inches x 0.8 inches x 4.9 inches and weighs in at only 7.9 oz.

The device its self is supported by the ever popular Windows Portable Media Center operating system, which is becoming the norm for many of today’s portable media products. Navigation of the device is simple and the 30GB hard drive offers sufficient space to save up to 24 of your favourite full length films and masses of your favourite songs. The Lithium ion battery offers 30 hours of audio playback and 8 hours media playback, with only a 3 hour recharge time - more than sufficient to watch a few of your favourite movies, or listen to hundreds of songs!

The design and look of the Toshiba Gigabeat V is sharp and focused, offering a high resolution 3.5 inch screen with in-built speaker and digital equalizer. This particular model supports an array of audio formats including MP3, WAV, WMA and protected WMA (DRM), together with the JPEG still image file format. It also offers hi-speed USB connection port, audio and video output socket and headphones for private playback.

The only real drawback to the Toshiba Gigabeat V is the actual transfer of video data from your PC to the Gigabeat V. The default process offered by the device is slow and cumbersome, and it appears that the best way to convert video data for playback on the Toshiba Gigabeat V is to convert the file using the popular WinAVI video conversion program. This is the only real drawback for a device which has a large screen, excellent navigation control and more than enough memory to store the majority of your favourite files and music.

While the Toshiba Gigabeat V is one of the better products around at the moment, it would not take an awful lot for competitors to come in and offer a vastly improved video transfer function. This is the only real downfall of the Toshiba Gigabeat V, which is unfortunate because it had the potential to take Toshiba to the next level. It can only be hoped that Toshiba are open to customer feedback and use this to improve their future offerings.