Customer Reviews

Samsung YP-MT6Z 1 GB Digital Audio Player Silver

5 star:		(48)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Revised review -- rating should read three stars. I've been happy with this player in three months of usage but have had three significant though surmountable problems:

-- Music files sorted wrong. Any files without a numeric prefix aren't necessarily sorted alphabetically--apparently only the first few characters of filenames are considered. This is especially bad for single pieces/songs divided into multiple files. So, even with a numeric suffix, such as "BachPartita1.wma", "BachPartita2.wma", and "BachPartita3.wma", files may not play in order unless you prefix them as "001BachPartita.wma", "002BachPartita.wma", etc. Fortunately, file renaming utilities can quickly rename groups of files, but obviously this is still tedious. Samsung support doesn't seem to understand the problem, and the version 1.101 firmware update doesn't fix it.
-- After two months without trouble, the player started spontaneously shutting down so often as to become unusable. After trying different batteries and other fixes, updating to the v1.101 firmware solved it, so probably the firmware or some data had become corrupted.
-- Custom settings get lost. When I copy music files to the player, I often find that all my settings for equalizer, radio presets, auto power-off, etc., have been lost and reset to defaults. I've worked around this by copying the SETTINGS.DAT file found on the player to my computer, then copying it back after copying music files.

So, Samsung's programmers probably aren't sharp, and one wonders whether similar problems exist on any Samsung MP3 player. I've seen reports of firmware problems on other brands of players. If I'd known about these glitches, I would have chosen something else, but I'm willing to work around them because I'm happy with the player in other respects. Feature-wise, it's the best choice among the Flash-based music players and doesn't have the downsides of the hard disk-based players.

I've tried repeatedly to post a complete review with more pros and cons of this player, but Amazon won't post it, and I have no idea why. The incompetence of Amazon customer service continues to astound.

Lets discuss this irrespective of the "space" here. By nature hard drive based players obviously offer larger space. Having said that, I'll write some questions to help you make your purchasing decision.

You can read the features above so I will not reiterate them.

[*]AA (disposeable) battery. Why is that good?
I don't like proprietary batteries. They are expensive, and after few months, they are out of production, non supported as companies come up with newer product models. So you're stuck. Now mp3 players (most of them) have the battery built in. What makes it even worse is that with exception to Creative players, most others are completelye irreplaceable. Ipods too! That is where AA, or AAA batteries come handy. They are found anywhere there is civilization. They are disposeable, cheap!
Of course this little wonder offers 40+ hours of playtime with just one AA battery. Ipods barely offer 10 hours of playtime. So compare that.

[*]The music formats.
Majority of the online music vendors use WMA format. Guess what? Ipods don't play them. Its because they want to force people to buy from itunes store (true for other Apple products, and Microsof is accuesed of monopoly!). With this Samsung player, you are not bound to a specific vendor. Dump your music in it, regardless of the source, it will start playing. Not to mention Samung player also plays more music formats than ipod.

[*]Line input.
Do you have old cassetts? Old records? VHS tapes? Got your favorite songs or any audio on them? Guess what, you can use this player to make mp3s from ANY audio source. Just connect the included cable and press record on the player. You don't need a computer for this. Line input is not available for Ipods even as an expensive add on.

[*]Built in mic.
Need to record your lecture? Capture a moment? Record live concerts or any other events with this feature. Now this is available for ipods. You can get an extra thing to carry for around $40 or more. Then again, Ipods are capable of handling only 1 accessory at a time. You have to remove other add on such as a remote

[*]Control without seeing?
Many people buy Ipods just to show off, "hey, look, I'm controlling an Ipod, look at me! Oopss, I forgot I can't operate it from my pocket! I need to have it in my hands to do everything, except the "hold" switch". Yah. Of course thats true. This Samsung player, you can operate from your pocekt, change volume, skip songs, on, off, pause basically everything. Obviously you'll need to look at the menus if you want to change the settings, but it no way requires you to look at it. You can operate it with your eyes closed. Ipods are incapable of being controlled without looking. There is a remote for ipods (another $40 extra) which has 3/4 buttons such as back, forward, volume up and down only!

[*]Size? Yes it matters.
Please have a look at the images I have added. You can see for yourself how "small" it is. It comfortably fits in your palm. A bit cube shaped so its easier to hold. Just a little bigger than an AA battery. Its just above 2 inches in height, and little more than a half inch depth.

[*]Flash? yes please!
I always prefer flash players to any "hard drive" based players. Sure the space is small, but flash players are more reliable. The reason is, in hard drive players, there are parts moving, spinning and if for any reason they are dropped accidentally, or experiences a big jerk, it is more than likely that the drive data reader (the magnetic head) being displaced. In plain English, your fancy hard drive player won't play anything any more. This is true for Ipods and any other hard drive player as well. Now flash players on the other hand, shake them with all of your might, nothing will happen, and the music will also be skip-free. Basically flash players are generally VERY stable, solid, not allergic to simple or tough shaking, jerk etc. Unless you break them with a hammer, or drive your car over them, flash players are very sturdy, tough guys.
By the way, if you don't believe me, you can try shaking your hard drive player but be WARNED, you might very well damage it parmanently!

[*]Others things about this player.
- Body is made of aluminum (2 sides) and plastic (2 sides) (Its one of the VERY few mp3 players that are extremely well built, built to last! Even some newer models from Samsuing are fully made of cheap plastic, which most other players are made of anyway).
- Portable storage. It comes with both cable and a mini plug so it can be uses as a storage drive. Its plug and play, platform independent. Translation, you can use it at your computer, your friends computer, your secret lovers computer, your boss's (if you're allowed) computer etc. Only few hard drive players are plug and play, but most of the flash players are plug and play.
- FM radio. It wasn't important for me, but its there. Reception is pretty good and again you can directly record from FM radio without any wires to mp3 format. You can even change the region, if you're moving outside the US.
- Advanced SRS, WOW effects, detailed, customizeable equaliser settings, display mode, default volume etc. As it might come as shocking to many, Ipods aren't the only players that "shuffles" music. Its a common feature that many many players have built in. You can set to normal, repeat 1, repeat all, and of course shuffle all songs in this Samsung player.

Final Verdict:
Please don't give in to the "hype" and just buy an ipod. Do compare the features, prices. Ipods are overrated, overpriced and offers very little for the money you pay for it. So if money doesn't matter to you, all you care about is how fashionable, how cool it looks, maybe Ipods are for you but if you are a serious, conscious, educated consumer, this Samsung player is a must buy. This is one purchase you will not regret. I'm actually getting a second one too!

This thing is great. I think it's my fourth or fifth mp3 player and it's the best I've had so far. I previously had Rio Carbon, which I really liked, but it got stolen, and I decided that my next mp3 player need to be flash based, since I hardly ever used one Gig out of the 5 Gig harddrive it had. After spending several hours researching, my choice was down to iRiver ifp-799 and this one. I decided to go for Samsung, because: 1) it is almost (...)cheaper 2) it has USB mass storage function, which is pretty useful when you want to carry any other documents or files with you 3) it has an international guarantee, which is very important for me, since I spend a lot of time abroad (Europe) 4) it is a lot smaller and looksway cooler than iRiver. I guarantee you, you'll have a lot more people wowing about this than about iRiver.

Once you get this thingy, you'll see that it is a whole LOT smaller than it seems to be on the pictures online, or even on the Cnet video. It is literally the size of a little thicker AAA battery! Speaking of which, powered by a AAA battery, it lasts for more than 40 hours of continuous play! No need to carry around an adapter or worry about having a worn out battery after a couple of years. Just get a 50 pack of AAA batteries from Amazon for (...)and keep listening... For how long? 2000 hours? Yes, that's right! Listen for two hours each and every day and it will still cost you 10 bucks to keep it alive for 3 years!!

The display seems to be a little too small, but it just big enough to contain all the information you can possibly need. I really liked the feature showing you the next song on your playlist on in the folder, so that you know what's going to follow. The backlight is of a nice blueish color and you can setup the time for the backlight to stay on after the player is on idle, and also the contrastof the display. When setup to a higher value than the predefined from the factory, the display is ver bright and sharp, and overall easy to read.

The controls are not as intuitive as on most other players, but reading the manual for about 5-10 minutes will explain everything in detail. After this, you'll really like the fact that the player only has three buttons plus the joystick. Once you become familiar with a couple of little tricks about the controls, you'll find it very easy to navigate.

The earplugs could certainly be better, but none of the mp3 player producers supplies high quality earphones. Not even Apple. While better earphones are not a complete necessity, you might consider getting them instead of the Samsung supplied ones.

This player, unlike some other players doesn't take too long to boot up. After about 4-5 seconds, it is ready to provide you with music. Some people say that it is a con that the player doesn't have a Power ON/OFF switch, but I think that holding a play button for about 1,5-2 seconds it really not that big of a deal.

What I dislike about the player is its sound quality. While it is not horrible by any means, it could be a lot better. It's fairly easy to tell that iRiver 799 (my friend has it), and also my old Rio Carbon have better sound than this thingy. On teh other hand, the quality is really not that bad, considering that I was also able to tell right away, that Apple's 4G iPod's sound quality wasn't even comparable with my Samsung. Simply, if you are an audiophile and need perfect quality sound, go for iRiver, iAudio, or Rio (which I think is a little behind iRiver and iAudio, who clearly lead the industry in sound quality). If you are like me and just look for something to listen to on your way to class or when traveling, go for Samsung, it will certainly cover your needs.

Another con could be that you have to remove the plastic cover (which is fairly nice by the way, and doesn't make it look any uglier than without it) if you want to remove the battery. I don't really see this as a problem, since you'll be changing the battery only once a month, or so.

I also really like the fact that you browse your music library using a folder system, just like in Windows. You can't look up songs based on artist or genre. This is however a matter of personal preference. I prefer the folder system and find it a lot easier to go around than the ID3Tag system, supported by my old Rio and also all iPods.

You can also build playlists on the go, which is pretty neat. It also tells you which song you already have in your list, so that you don't add it twice by accident. The playlist feature is really simple and can only store one playlist, but I think this is sufficient and fulfills its purpose.

It is kinda hard to switch the HOLD button when the using the plastic case, but this is a minor flaw and wouldn't keep me from buying this thing again.

If this device doesn't break and works reliably for me, I don't really have anything I would not like about it. Some might not like the sound quality, but again, you need to know what are you going to use it for. For everyday use, the quality is more than sufficient.

(...)

I just bought my player yesterday and I am very happy with it. It is very small, LCD is clear and the sound quality is great. My only complaints are that the rewind/fast forward speeds are constant and not very fast. This can be kind of a pain if you are trying to find your spot in a 60 minute PodCast. The other complaint is that the file sorting seems a bit limited. The only way I can get it to sort correctly is if I have the track number as the first two digits of the file name. If the track number follows the artist or album name, it does not sort correctly. Hopefully these will be fixed in future firmware upgrades. All-in-all, however, I am very satisfied.


As a follow up: I have been using my player primarily with OGG files. However, I have had frequent "lock-ups" that can only be cleared by removing the battery. Some OGG files will just not play on it, some will just cause it to turn off. After I convert the OGG's to MP3's things seem to work fine. Again, this is probably something that they can fix in the firmware.

I love this little guy. I did alot of research before buying this. I knew I wanted a player that used a AA or AAA battery, and I knew I wanted a small player with lots of battery life. At first I was looking at the Creative TX FM because I loved the idea of having a flash player that instantly plugged into your USB. The thought of not having to lug a wire around was nice. But I just couldn't get over the 15 hour battery life! Then I was considering the iaudio g3. It had great reviews and a whopping 50 hour battery life! Sounded great, but I just wasn't impressed with the size of the unit, kinda big compared to other flash players. Then the Samsung YP came into the picture! I was stoked when I found out that this player has a 42 hour battery life, is extremely compact in size, and comes with a little instant USB connector - much less clunkier to carry around than a cable (though it came with a cable too, which is nice.) I thought that all was enough, but then I found out it also came with a wire that you can connect to a cd player to burn your cds into mp3s (or could connect it to a cassette player as well), kinda nice if you aren't a techie or if you're bored during travel, it'd give you something to do.

The controls were a little hard to figure out at first, but I got it after a little while without using the manual. And the radio is fair, and if you've got a good station, you can make a pretty good recording of a song.

Good luck with your hunting, hope this review helps you with your decision!

PS During my hunting I found alot of complaints about errors occurring with songs not showing up, etc. I've never had this problem, but I also make sure I choose the "safely remove hardware" option in the taskbar at the bottom of the computer (shows up in my XP and MS 2000 operating systems). You have to dismount the player every time before unplugging it or you could get errors.

This review is meant for people who are trying to decide between the Samsung YP-MT6Z, Sandisk 1GB and Creative Muvo (also the iAudio U2).

I was looking for an mp3 player with the following features:
1. Powered by AAA or AA battery.
2. 1 GB Flash storage, operated without any interface software.
3. LCD screen with backlight.
4. FM Radio and Voice Recording.
5. Small and Portable.
6. Good sound quality. (This being the most important factor)

Samsung MT6Z fitted the bill very well. I got it in Feb 2006. Here are my first impressions of this tiny, solid player.

1.It feels very solidly built and it is made of Aluminum on two sides. It oozes a confident construction quality which is usually seen in some classic Made in Japan products. By the way this one is made in China. My only gripe is a fragile and vulnerable looking battery cover hinge. So be careful with it.

2.It comes with a lot of accessories which justifies the price. I got it for 130 USD. Mine came with good quality Samsung earphones, lanyard, good looking clear plastic protective sleeve, Line-in encoding cable, USB cable and portable mini USB adapter, 1 AA battery and of course the CD and printed manual.

3.The sound quality is excellent thanks to the SRS WOW effect. You can tweak the settings, but so far I haven't felt the need to do so. It sounds perfect in the default WOW mode and with the supplied Samsung earphones.

4.BEAUTIFUL- That's how anyone would describe it, especially if the bluish-white backlight is ON. A blue halo shows up around the joystick when pressed, which adds to its aesthetic appeal. The LCD display is eminently readable with or without the backlight.

5.FM Radio is awesome, as is the Voice Recording feature. The battery life is pretty good, definitely above 30 hours on one AA battery. I still have to try the Encoding feature.


Anyone going for the MT6Z player at this stage of production in 2006(second year), is very less likely to complain because it now comes with version 2 of the firmware which has fixed a few problems mentioned elswhere by others. I would recommend this to anyone who is trying to decide between the cheaper Sandisks, or the veteran creative players. Forget about the iPod Shuffle, the Samsung blows it away by miles on all grounds. The problem with sandisk players is that the build and sound quality is nowhere as good as the Samsung and the Creatives suffer from the perennial problem of micro (hard to read) LCD displays. The only player that comes close enough is the Cowon iAudio U2 which has a rechargeable Lithium battery in it with a battery life of 10 - 15 hours.

Good luck in your pursuit of a perfect MP3 player.
Sam Pony

I've had this player for a few days now, and I've been very pleased with it thus far. I was looking for a player that had one thing, and one thing only: sound quality. For the most part, I was quite surprised that sound quality seemed to be an afterthought in most reviews, both by customers and professional review sites. I did, however, find a site that includes it as a major factor *and* has reviews for just about every major player on the market (CNet), and this one rated an 8/10, above even the IPods, which got 6's and 7's. But anyways, what I liked about the player (from the most signifigant to the least signifigant):

1) Well, the sound quality of course! This little bugger delivers very high quality sound. It has full base (though not of earth-shaking quality) which brings out the low tones, and the high tones don't get raspy or fuzzy like even my pc speakers can do from time to time. It has also got a pretty big list of sound options you can customize, including SRS effects, WOW effects, TruBass, and the fully customizable EQ bar with 4 or so presets. I was very impressed to find that SRS actually added a great deal of 'depth' to the music when activated; I didn't think such a small little device could deliver such deep sound! The volume does go up fairly high (plenty to hurt my ears in a 'normal' environment), but I cannot say if it can shine through the sound generated by heavy equipment such as a chainsaw or tractor as yet. I will update my review once I get an answer to this question though.

2) Price. This thing is priced very competetively. I pretty much scratched IPods off of my list of possible players when I saw this one's price: $130 for the 1gb model and $100 for the 512mg model. This is paying for a player that I believe surpasses IPods on many levels.

3) Battery life. It is no less than triple the battery life of most other players, and according to CNet, it can actually last LONGER than advertised. If you haven't found out yet, it is advertised at 42 hours on a AA battery, but CNet said it can last a bit longer. Anyways, especially given the sound quality that the device delivers, this is extremely impressive.

4) Flash Drive. This was another point-of-sale for me. I'm a college student, so I wanted my player to double as a flash drive. This one does. It does come with a driver pack for some reason, but it *is* plug-and-play, even on the inexplicably strange computers at my school, which sometimes don't even allow the use of floppy disks.

5) Feature packed.

-It was icing on the cake at this point, but it's all still worth mentioning. This thing has a mic on it, which is very sensetive. It can easily pick up voices that you can hear, and it isn't too terrible on the ambience. I.E., I don't have to struggle to hear what is being said during playback at the highest sound quality. Also, on the highest bitrate (128kbps; you can lower it signifigantly), about 500mb of space = 35 hours of recording time. That's about 14mb per hour of recording at the highest quality.

-It is easy to navigate too. It has a joystick that acts as the fast forward/song skip when moved left and right, and a volume control when moved up and down. Finally, pressing it down acts as the "enter" button. When held down, this button takes you straight to the main menu, from which you can access everything the player can do, except the record function. There's also a play/pause button, a playlist button, and the record button. The playlist button is the only thing that I can't for the life of me figure out, but it is explained in the manual...I just need to sit down and figure it out one day. The record button is perused by holding it down for a few seconds to start recording, and tapping it again to stop recording. All in all a very easy-to-use player.

-The LCD screen is small, yet easy to read. The whole display system is nice and easily readable, partly due to a backlight that greatly improves the contrast (which is also adjustable). It is small, though, so long song names have to scroll. But when playing music, it displays the current song, a bar that fills in as the song completes, a customizable timer (can count up from beginning of song or down to the end of the song, etc), what sound improvements you're using (SRS, WOW, EQ, etc), battery life, your play mode (shuffle, playlist, etc), and lastly, the next song that it intends to play. Quite a bit of stuff to fit on one screen, but it's all there ;). The menu system is quite easy to navigate, too.

-Can play WMA files. The biggest benefits of this are that Windows Media Player prefers to rip music in this format, and that WMA files are actually very good anyways - they average about 1/2 to 2/3 the size of MP3's, with a nigh unnoticable reduction in sound quality. Obviously it can play MP3's as well.

All that said, there are some downsides to this player. The most signifigant of them is that it does pop and hiss on a few songs. I have misgivings that it is the song, though, and not the player itself...it only does it on a select few songs, and I haven't been able to determine what is different about those songs. But that is immaterial...be it the player or the song, it has done it to me so it will probably do it to you.

It also doesn't have any armband...just a lanyard. It is easily operated from your pocket, but it strikes me as somewhat negligent of Samsung to not include an armband, especially considering how diligent they were with the other features of this player.

Finally, and this is more of a pet-peeve of mine than anything else, it doesn't have an integrated male USB port. It has the female end of the digital camera/printer type of USB port, which is connected to the computer via one of the two adapters they provide. This means that if I want to use it as a flash drive at school, I have to keep track of either the cord or the small cordless adapter they provide. Said adapter can support the weight of the player while extending horizontally from the USB port (or even vertically - my Dell has a few vertical USB ports), which is a plus, but I would still love to have seen an integrated port that could plug straight into the computer.

Don't let those few complaints shy you away from getting this player, though. As my score for it attests, it is quite nearly perfect, especially for my purposes. It delivers great sound quality that can be sustained for an extremely long period of time. It delivers a simple, easy to use menu with simple, easy to use controls. And, most importantly, it is a very solid built piece of equipment. I'm obviously not going to drop it to test it, but its casing is rock solid - I'm confident that it can take a pretty good beating without failing.

I was looking for a small, flash based, OGG/MP3 player, FM reception, exchangeable batteries, LCD display and compatibility with Linux. This player fits, even exceeds, my feature list and expectations.

Its a very well built little device. Lightweight, most of the weight is actually the battery's weight.

Amazing battery life, I don't know of any other player that can come close to ~40 hours playback with a single AA battery.

Nice looking LCD display, packed with useful info, readable, crisp.

FM reception is great, although the sound is muffled. It switches automatically between MONO and STEREO reception, I wasn't sure it had STEREO FM reception when I ordered it.

Excellent sound quality, although the OGG tracks sound clearer than the MP3 ones, although it could be the encoding settings.

Included earphones could be better, I had to set the WOW settings to focus on "high" to get to the higher spectrum of sound. I tried some other Sony headphones I have, they sounded better.

There are so many settings to play around with, especially the sound related options. Although I think the engineers are pushing it with the various options. For instance, you can set the backlight duration for the LCD and the JOG dial to different durations, I don't think that's a vital thing to have. Although it shows that the player is quite flexible in its settings. The sound related settings are quite a lot, which is a good thing since you can customize it to your enjoyment.

Another great thing about this player is that its a standard mass storage device, which means you can copy files on it and move them with you.

It also means that it works with Linux without any hassle. My home machine has Slackware 10, Fedora Core 3 at work they both accessed the device flawlessly. Its great that you don't have to use any proprietary software to interact with the player. I didn't even open/use the supplied CD, since I don't have access to a Windows machine.

Regarding some other reviewers concern about Apple support, I'm sure it simply works on Macs since it already works with Linux.

I read some reviews that this player is buggy, random crashes, crashes while listening to OGG tracks. I got mine with firmware version 2.121, I'm guessing they fixed up any bugs in this latest firmware, because I still haven't seen a single crash or anything unusual and most of my collection is in OGG format.

I also read about a folder limitation bug, well I filled the 1GB with 14 folders, many of them with two nested folders and I have no problem in accessing any of the tracks.

Kudos for Samsung for making such a nice player, I will keep an eye on Samsung products from now on. Although they should list Linux as a supported platform on the package itself, I shouldn't search on forums to figure out if its supported or not.

Here are some first impressions on my use of the Samsung MT6Z.

PRO

- The unit does most things promised.
- Controls and navigation take some practice, but not bad.
- Transferring files back and forth using WMP 10 is easy.
- The product as shipped is very complete.
- My unit, Mfgd. in April 2005 had software version 1.111 installed.

CON

- Files from the built in mike are recorded in WAV, not MP3.
- The voice capacity is only about 70 minutes due to the WAV encoding.
- I could not get the included Samsung Music Studio to convert WAV files to MP3 or WMA as advertised. It just did nothing (on a high powered, standard HP AMD XP/SP2 machine which does everything else perfectly.) (I had to use Audacity with LAME to do WAV to MP3 conversion.)
- The Samsung web help, just returns a message to call the 800#. The 800# takes your info and promises a call back, which after a week has not yet come.

OTHER

- I need to record longer for meetings, etc, so I built an external mike and amp (easy - details if you want) and use the ENC jack to force MP3 encoding. At the default settings of 128 kb it uses about 1 MB per minute, giving a theoretic voice capacity of 1000 minutes = 16 hrs.

- Samsung has a good product, but REALLY needs to work on its customer support to avoid tarnishing its technical image.

How rare it is that I can give a 5 to a product. It isn't perfect but virtually nothing is and this is close. How often do you buy something to find out it doesn't come equipped with the basics which require you to buy more later? How often do you wish that many other features were present when you find out all the limitations? That doesn't happen here. Where oh where do I begin?

Let's start with the package. Not only do you get the mini-USB to USB-2 cable, but you ALSO get an ultraportable mini-USB adapater that is an inch long. But there's more. You get a cheap plastic cover with good cutouts for the buttons, you get an alkaline AA battery (how many never come with batteries?), decent pair of comfortable in ear headphones, necklace strap, acceptable software for ripping CDs and CONVERTING CDs and files from various formats to MP3, Ogg, WMA, etc., an EXTRA stereo to stereo 1/8" plug so you can go directly into a line in somewhere such as a car stereo -- nice so far eh? But you also do get a full GB of RAM too for a price that without the accessories is at or below the competition.

Now let's get to the actual unit. The FM radio is OK (not super strong but what did you expect? It's very reasonable.) Sonic quality is very reasonable to very good too (and I'm a musician) but what really compensates for any deficiency is the wealth of options such as preset EQs, WOW, SRS, and various different settings you can use to completely change the way the music sounds in your headphones. Amazing - I didn't like the way some of the files played until I found a superb setting that emphasized the bass a little but also had middle edge. Very cool. Using a Palm Treo I can say that the sound is virtually as good if not better, with the ability to add more effects to customize the way you like the sound. It can be punchy!

But there's more. You can setup various playlists, folders with different files so you can separate your albums and songs, It shows current and next song, does a quick fade from old song and fade into new song that really soothes the ear, records MP3 off the FM radio (!), has a weak but acceptable voice recorder (hey, it's just an extra) with a built in Microphone (only records in wav), upgradeable software (cool!), a neat blue light, and works forever on 1 AA battery (it really lasts very long, definitely over 30 hours.)

You'll find the menus pretty well setup and it's understandable that there is a little learning curve because you can't fit loads of buttons on it. However, it's pretty intuitive. It DOES have a hold button to prevent accident turn-ons.

Negatives? Very difficult to find and I'd say they are more wishful thinking for the next generation. Would be nice if voice recording would go directly into an encoded format. I wish the case was a little less plastic (the battery door is a little flimsy and handle with care.) Otherwise, this thing is barely bigger than an AA battery, is light, tiny, packs a HUGE amount of music if you put it in the superior OGG or WMA format (much more efficient than MP3)... oh yeah. Unlike the iPod you can drag and drop files onto it like it was a RAM stick and it will work to play audio files immediately and can also be used to store data.

I am unusually harsh on products and like to find those where manufacturers created a labor of love and wanted to give consumers good value for their money by building the better mousetrap. This is and even for the money it didn't skimp. I love this thing and didn't even expect to buy one...