THE stone was mankind's original gadget. The Zen Stone is also a gadget. That's all we've got. Just read the bloody article.

In these heady days of robots, teleportation and human colonies on Pluto, it's easy to forget how far we have come. Technology has an uncanny knack of becoming essential in a bewilderingly brief time, leaving even modern types baffled at how they used to cope without wonders like mobile phones and the Internet. And they've only been around for a few year. Imagine what life must have been like in "the war" - either of them - when there were no cars, no clothing, not even speech had been invented. Back then everything was made of potato. It's a hideous thought.

But it gets worse. The further back in time you travel - and we know, we've been - the worse it gets. By the time you've got back to the 1700s the human race is little more than a collection of limbless tadpole-style creatures lolling about and rutting in the mud. Not so much as a gramophone between them, let alone an iPod. However, it was at around this time, give or take a few tens of thousands of years, that mankind first discovered the allure of the gadget. Crouching down, our simplistic ancestor plucked a humble stone from the ground and bashed it against his head. Through the pain, he saw a revelation. With this simple device in his hand, early man was empowered. He could use it to kill dogs and cows. He could hit his rivals with it until they fell over. He could try to eat it.

Anthropologists would call this the discovery of tools. Rollzero went to university once and we call it the discovery of gadgets. Either way, it was nothing short of a miracle, and it wasn't long before our hirsute hero had fashioned his stone into a rudimentary PDA, wirelessly synchronising appointments, emails and contact information with all the bigger stones inside his cave. Space travel probably came next. We're not good with timelines.

The idea that a stone would be considered technically impressive nowadays seems ludicrous. But nobody's told Creative, which has decided to take the concept of the stone and "re-imagine" it. Unsurprisingly, considering the company's heritage, it's ended up with an mp3 player. Called the Zen Stone, it's a device in the mould of the iPod Shuffle, only better.

It's far too small to kill a cow with - you'd have to glue it to Jeep and then drive the Jeep into the cow - but it shares other things in common with its namesake, man's original gadget. For one thing, it's ludicrously cheap, selling for less than £30, which you can't even buy snacks for these days. Secondly, it looks nice, like a nice looking stone. You can find those at the beach. And lastly, you can try to eat it, although you would only try that if you were a huge idiot, or that French bloke who can eat wine glasses. If you don't eat it, it will reward you with ten hours of battery life, 1gb of storage, a nice and easy uploading package that doesn't tie you to iTunes and availability in a range of delightful colours. Yum. Or rather, ug.