mcleodnine

[Log in to get rid of this advertisement]

Samsung "Yepp" YP-55V - 256Mb

The first thing you'll want to do when your hands on one of these is flash the onboard system. Unfortunately if you're not a developer on the Wine project you're going to need to borrow a Windows box. Be prepared to eat a healthy dose of crow and bring suitable condiments.

I used it for a few days with the factory setup and it managed to thunk out on me with a "Please Reformat~!" message. No amount of fdisk/cfdisk/sfdisk and mtools would allow me to fix it so I was tied to a windows box for a spell. After formatting with the Samsung-supplied tools and flashing to a more recent firmware (but an older storage driver... weird) I noticed that the button responses were considerably faster.

Also noteworthy for Linux users is that my 2.4.22 kernel on Slackware 9.1 decided to mount the device as a USB (so far so good) but chose the 'umsdos' filesystem which truncates all files to the old DOS 8.3 naming convention. Mount the device as -t msdos and life will be a lot sweeter.

Music sounds pretty good but you're not going to get a lot of bass response or ear-shattering vocals when you're powering it with a single AAA battery.

Voice recording works as advertised and the MP3 encoding can capture either from the on-board FM tuner or a 2.5mm line-in jack. Selectable bit rates allows encoding in 32/48/64/96/128 bitrates. The voice recording with the built-in mic will only encode .wav format.

Kit includes a 3 foot USB cable (mini usb termination at the YP-55 end) as well as a much more portable adapter that allows you to leave the cable at home and use the Yepp as a memory stick. Leashes, earphones and a sort of lipstick-case looking thing which you could presumably put the Yepp into.

I'd rate this thing a 9 or a 10 if I could find a way to ditch the Windows formatting tool, but I can't, so I give it an 8.