These days most of the e-shops are full of PMPs (personal media players). They come in all shapes, sizes and colours ? red, pink, yellow, blue, green, silver, golden, black. You name it and you get the colour. So much so that these show windows resemble flowerbeds. But the similarity ends there. Visit any garden and you will find placards saying ?please do not touch?. With PMPs it?s the opposite ? touch me, they say.

LG recently launched its PMP with a touch screen interface, named Touch Me FM37. The visiting-card-size (52mm x90mm x10 mm) player is eye candy for sure. Sporting a metal finish with textured ivory black (the one I got for review) front and rear bezels, it has mirrored stainless steel sides.

The face of Touch Me has just the company logo on top and a 2.4 inches TFT 256K colour touch screen. The only buttons that the player has, one slider to switch on/off and put the device on hold and another to activate recording, are placed on top and the left side. A tiny hole, that doubles up as a microphone and reset button, is also placed on the top panel. The lower side has the mini USB port with a cover and a port for earphone jack.

The display screen is crisp and bright and reproduces colours vividly without any trace of bleeding.

The basic-looking on-screen interface in grey, red and white icons, is a wee bit flat (could have used 3D) but it serves the purpose. The touch screen is highly sensitive and accurate and responds to commands instantly. The on-screen text menus are highlighted in red and are legible even in the bright daylight but they are too closely packed for comfort, especially for people with big hands.

Like the video, the audio quality is also excellent. The supplied ear buds are decent enough and reproduce sound faithfully and noticeably louder than most of the other top-end personal multimedia players. One has to juggle around a bit in the menu to locate the equaliser, but once there, you can finetune your audio and music will pour out without jarring, even at louder volume.

To download music and video one has to install LG?s propriety software ?media center 1.00? to their windows based PCs from the provided CD. Touch Me interfaces with the PC through USB and one can just drag and drop audio and other files to it. It will play MP3, MP3 VBR, WMA and few other formats effortlessly. Though LG claims that it should accept MPEG4 and WMV9 formats for video, I faced a lot of trouble adding video from my computer, despite the media center software converting them. It was only after a long struggle that I could manage to transfer a few clippings of popular Hindi film songs to Touch Me. Once done, it was smooth sailing and the songs played smoothly without any jitters. Holding all the colours intact, the moving images were sharp and bright. Though the display screen is not very big and a bit squarish (I would have preferred a more wide aspect ratio as most of the modern day movies are shot on cinemascope format) the moving images looked natural for close and personal viewing despite wasting a lot of viewing area on the top and bottom area of the display screen. The supplied earbuds reproduced bass reasonably well and high frequencies were crisp, but the mid range was muddled up a bit. Still, the audio sounded good enough.

The LG Touch Me has a 4GB of memory and can also hold your photographs and display them as a slide show with music or commentary that can be recorded through the built-in microphone. It also has some flash-based games in case you get bored watching movies.

The built-in battery can play audio for 20 hours and video for three hours and it gets charged through the USB while connected to your PC. The USB charger is optional and does not come in the pack (I think it should have been provided as part of the package).

Though the name Touch Me FM37 suggests that the FM tuner is also incorporated, it is not. Again, it is optional to some models (the one I got for review does not have one). The Touch Me is light in weight (just 66grams) and solidly built and comes in very attractive packaging.

At an MRP of Rs 11,990 (inclusive of all taxes) it?s worth 10 grams of solid gold.