Samsung YP-T9 MP3 Player

Sexy, isn’t it? And it might just knock Apple’s smug little Nano off its pedestal.

In many ways, the Samsung T9 is better than Apple’s iPod Nano. Not only is it a tiny music player, it plays back video files, displays JPEGs and text files -- and can do most of this without being paired with the included software. Once you replace the T9’s included low end bud headphones, it even sounds richer and deeper than a Nano.

The T9 connects to your PC with a cable with a USB port on one end and a proprietary Samsung connector for the T9 on the other. This will charge and synch the T9, although it would have been nice if it had used a standard Mini USB connector instead. Once connected, it will show up as a straight removable drive, with folders for music, video, photos, text and recordings (which has two sub-folders for recordings made from the inbuilt FM radio or the embedded microphone).

There are two ways to manage your music -- simply copying your tunes like you would copy them to any removable drive will work, but the excellent included software can take care of it too. Anything you copy with the software is organised into the library; anything copied manually isn’t -- but the software can work around this.

If you use the software to administer your music collection, it will simply dump your files into the music folder on the device without using any kind of directory structure. The leaves a long list of files in its wake, but on the flipside everything is organised on the player according to ID3 tags, the file names are kept intact (which is great if you’re organised, but a problem if you have two different tracks with the same file name) and the 2GB capacity imposes a hard limit on how far out of control the list can get.

Alternatively, you can copy files through Windows Explorer and access your tunes through the T9’s included file browser. Once you fire up the included software and tell it to reorganise your library, all the music you’ve copied manually is added to the library, where they are organised according to ID3 tags. It will do this to files in subfolders too, which works around the software’s filename limitations.

Those of you with a pair of Stereo Bluetooth headphones should rejoice; the T9 will wirelessly stream music to them and the headphones will control the player. You can use a pair of 3.5mm headphones at the same time too. Unfortunately, that’s the extent of the Bluetooth functionality. We would have loved to have seen Bluetooth PC synchronisation or Zune-like sharing functionality built in, but them’s the breaks. Only music can be streamed to Bluetooth headphones, so when you’re playing back video you’ll be tethered to the T9 with a wired pair of cans.

The audio and video encoders that are included on the CD are actually freeware, and after clicking through a dialogue box indemnifying Samsung against causing your computer grievous harm, you’ll have installed the Xvid and Lame MP3 codecs. Videos are converted by the included software to SVI -- Samsung’s MPEG4 variant -- at a resolution of 208 x 176. The results are excellent, although you’ll have to hold the matchbox-sized close to you for best results. You should also abandon all hope of being able to read any subtitles.

Although we love almost everything about it, from the sexy shape to the beautiful file management system, we aren’t fans of the slight lag in scrolling through menus, the ten second wait before it boots up or the fact that when it does boot up it will ignore your last used volume settings and default to half.

The clear and concise menu system (which can be set to change background colour every time you turn it on) and the software’s beautifully integrated ability to balance automatic and manual file management is a reprieve from these little annoyances though. It’s available in 2 or 4GB versions, and in spite of the $70 premium over the Nano, we are still fans.