I needed a new 'every-day' MP3 player and was looking for something under £100 that was compact and could double as a USB drive with between 512MB and 1GB of storage. Ideally I wanted something that would take standard batteries so I didn't need to have yet another charger cluttering up my 4-way socket strips.

I ended up buying a tiny Samsung 'Yepp' YP-T6 for £80 from my local Dixons and am very impressed with the features and functionality crammed into this tiny device.

The word tiny will loom, err, large in this review because it's the best word to describe the the YP-T6. 'Small' doesn't do justice to a fully featured MP3 player that is only slightly larget than the single AAA battery that powers it.

The YP-T6 is beautifully designed with a sleek retro look and tiny but well marked controls. The white backlit screen and bright blue ring around the thumbstick look great and aid use in dull light although you have to find the other controls by touch.

The player comes with all the accessories you need - a protective case, wrist strap, those instantly tangled necklace headphones, one cheap AAA battery, a 2 meter USB cable, a tiny USB adaptor plug (pictured above) and a CD-Rom with some media manager software and firmware updater (Windoze only of course).

After a quick game of CD-frisbee I plugged the USB cable into the port on the player then stuffed the other end into my Linux workstation which instantly recognised it as a usb-storage device and made it available as a mountable drive.

Needless to say the first thing I did was try and break it. I want to be able to use it to boot a diskless Linux installation from the player so I split the drive into two FAT16 partitions and installed Linux on the second. During this process I wrote a new MBR and partition table. The player continued working fine although it could only access the first partition. Windows could only access the first partition too. Linux, of course, could see both. I still haven't been able to get Linux to boot from the second partition yet but I'm working on it.

Having failed to break the YP-T6 I started using it. Rather than untangle those unpleasent grey-plastic headphones I elected to throw them after the software CD in the direction of the bin and replace them with some high-quality, lightweight in-ear Sony things that I've used for years.

With decent headphones in place the sound was great and there are masses of options for tweaking it. From a simple user-eq through surround-sound and truebass to WOW audio shaping there is plenty of scope for fiddling. Getting the settings right for death metal encoded at 96kbps was a challange but still quite doable. The controls are easy to use and the menu-driven interface is intuative enough, although building a playlist required a quick read of the manual.

By this point I had read a couple of reviews on the web and was surprised to find that apparently some models of the YP-T6 have a built-in FM radio tuner - not mine though and I don't know why. I didn't even want FM radio but now I know that I don't have it - well, grrrr.

So other than the lack of a feature I didn't even know I was missing I am very happy with this little bit of kit.

• Tiny enough to fit on a key chain.
• Great battery life and no charger needed.
• Good sound with decent headphones.
• Line-in for direct encoding.
• Choice of tiny USB 'plug' (pictured above) or full size cable (both included in package).
• Works with (most) Linux and Windows PCs with no extra drivers required.
• Protective plastic case and wrist-strap included
• Fast USB 2.0 transfer speeds.
• Great case and interface design. Good backlights for screen and thumb-stick.

• Those nasty necklace-style headphones.
• Line-in lead is 3.5-to-2.5mm male stereo jacks, spare 3.5-to-3.5mm leads are easier to find.
• I know it's in my room somewhere but it's sooo tiny...