OneAndOneIs2

At last night's LUG meeting, the theme was "Bring a gadget"

I took my Samsung YP-U2 - AKA my MP3 player.

It's a smallish portable player, which plugs directly into a USB socket. Its battery is charged via USB, and I can't honestly tell you the battery life because it's never actually run out of power on me yet.

Any modern OS will see it as a generic storage device, and naturally it's FAT-formatted so any OS can read & write it. It can do playlists (which I don't use) and has a "Play at random" option (which I do).

It has unusually good quality audio playback, and a range of preset equalizer settings. It has a very small screen and a blue LED at one end.

In short, it's a nice little music player that does just about everything I'm ever likely to want it to do.

Doesn't really sound "gadgety" or "geeky" tho, does it?

It isn't, to tell the truth. But I get so tired of people telling me that it's a class of gadget that doesn't exist. Because they're still out there: The people who claim that you can't buy portable media players that have support for Ogg.

Even when I tell them I own one, and link them to the places they can buy the damn things, they refuse to believe it. They're so determined to argue that "Ogg might be technically better but you can only use it on PCs." It's crazy.

Samsung seems to be pretty big on Ogg support - lots of their devices play them. And why not, it's a free format, no royalties to pay. A big reason I've not bought an iPod is that most of my music collection is Ogg.

There are a number of good, inexpensive MP3 players that also do Ogg. They really do exist, I know because I own one and Lou owns another. If you see anybody arguing that MP3s are better than Ogg because they're more portable, slap them.

And speaking of portable, one thing that makes my player a little geekier than most is that I've installed the portable version of the Windows VLC player on it - so if I happen to be sat at a Windows PC, I can play my music on it even though Windows is so amazingly primitive it doesn't have out-of-the-box support for Ogg.