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My New Love

Posted: Wed, 7 September 2005 | permalink | No comments

She's very petite, with several fun bits to twiddle with, and gets quite noisy when I press the right buttons. She also comes with her own USB adapter.

I am, of course, talking about my new music player. A Samsung YP-T6 1GB audio doodad. For AU$229 (retail even; I couldn't be arsed doing the whole bargain hunting thing), I got:

• An MP3, OGG, WAV, etc decoder;
• An FM radio;
• A quite reasonable user interface;
• A voice recorder (the actual reason I purchased anything);
• 1GB of storage space (impressive in and of itself);
• All in an utterly tiny package (about 4x1.5x1.5cm).

Further features include the fact that it takes AAA batteries (so no need to worry about a crap internal battery dying, or charging it on the very rare occasion I'm laptopless), and THAT IT PLAYS OGG FILES!

Did I mention that it plays the freely available and non-DRM-encumbered OGG Vorbis audio format? I'm quite impressed by that, even more so that I didn't realise it at first.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm very, very keen on supporting companies that support free media formats. That's why I'd planned on purchasing a DMC-500 HDD-based player from the US, when I had the money. But, in the meantime, I needed a dictaphone-type device for work, and I figured that my wife (who has a fairly painful commute that's at least partially my fault) could use an MP3 player when I don't need to record other peoples' ramblings.

So, I bought the Samsung on it's non-OGG-related features (don't worry, I definitely asked around for something OGG-supporting, but came up with nothing). It was definitely worth it for me on those features alone. Then I looked at the packaging when I was paying for it, and lo! there is was, in nice large lettering, before WMA support even.

My sincere kudos to Samsung for thinking of those of us who don't want to be stuck with paying for our music over and over and over, and producing what is definitely a quality entry in the portable digital audio player market. I recommend that anyone in the market for one of these things take a serious look at the YP-T6.