MP3 players: It's cool to be small

They don't come neater than Samsung's Yepp 30S and Apple's iPod, two design-led machines that actually do what they're meant to

Last week I noted how badly things can go wrong with something ostensibly as simple as an MP3 player – which only needs to let some data in, turn it into music, and pipe that out to you. Thank goodness that some companies have turned arc lights on to the problem – notably Samsung, of Korea, and Apple Computer.

Samsung are generally thought of as makers of lots of items that you see in Dixons – generally, techno stuff that you don't expect to last, but it's priced that way too. The company is trying to move itself away from that sort of image. I think the Yepp 30S (YP-30S) is successful there. It's small, the sort of thing you could easily lose down the back of the sofa; it's so light it's easy to forget you've got it on you. The shape looks strange at first but once you realise that the shell half-opens to expose the USB socket, you realise that Samsung has achieved some rather clever workarounds for the problems of how you control an MP3 player while keeping it small.

There's a cool little display on the front, and a rocker switch at the top for shifting back and forth between tracks. And how do you turn it on or off? Follow the designers' thinking here: a further button would mean another potential mechanical failure. So the rocker switch can be pushed in for your on/off function, as well as choosing from menus – backlight on or off, which of four equalisations to have, bass booster on or off. Now that's smart design. It can even record voice memos. It runs on a single AAA battery too, managing more than three hours in my tests. And the sound is good.

However, with MP3 players, the software that runs on your computer is also important. Here, too, Samsung has done well; the Yepp software (for PCs and Mac, though not Mac OSX) has an elegant interface and doesn't get too fussy about things. Drag and drop your files from your main MP3 list (you'll need a separate player; on Windows, Microsoft's Windows Media Player or Winamp from winamp.com, will do, and on Apple Macs, Apple's own iTunes is hard to beat), and the files get sent to the machine. It can handle Windows Media Audio files, and also AAC files, an up-and-coming format that achieves greater compression yet sounds better than any of the others.

The only disappointment about the Yepp 30S is that you only get 64Mb of flash memory. One benefit is that it doesn't take long to fill via a USB connection; but for that you'll only get about an hour of music. But at £199, good design just doesn't come cheap.

The same is true for Apple's iPod, which comes in two versions, one holds up to 5 gigabytes (5,000 Mb) and the other up to 10 Gb. That's enough for 1,000 and 2,000 songs. With those models costing £349 and £429 respectively, the iPod has been called "the £1,500 MP3 player" since Apple only intended for it to be connectable to Apple machines. However, a company called Mediafour has produced XPlay (http://www.mediafour.com/products/xplay), which lets PCs and iPods communicate, as long as your PC has a Firewire port. If it doesn't, you will need to buy a Firewire plug-in card, which will cost between £20 and £80. Xplay works rather well; the iPod shows up as a drive in your window, and you can drag songs on to it from Windows Media Player.

But the iPod really starts to shine once plugged into an Apple machine. If you have iTunes it will start it up and immediately synchronise its contents with any songs and "playlists" you have there. If you have more than 5 or 10Gb of songs, then it'll send over all the playlists it can to your iPod, and then stop. You can also use the iPod for data storage, of files and contact details (from a Palm). A suitably rich troubleshooter can carry around the equivalent of back-up disk plus music while he, or she, works.

What is really impressive, though, is the speed of song-loading. Firewire runs at up to 400 Mbits/s, rather than the 12 Mbits/s of USB. That means that you can fill up an iPod in about five minutes. Even smarter is that the Firewire connection recharges the battery, which does get the advertised 10 hours of playing time. (There's also a separate mains charger.)

Turn it on and you really begin to see why Jonathan Ive, Apple's head of design, has almost achieved godhead among his peers. What design would you pick to find one of 2,000 songs on something the size of a cigarette packet? The iPod solves that with a little scroll wheel between the central button and the outer four buttons (for on/off, backward, forward, and menu). You can whirl it around with a thumb and hit just the track you want in a few moments. Simple, and brilliant. Even the headphone lead is plenty long enough to put the player in a trouser pocket – a detail sometimes overlooked by others. I've struggled to find a design fault. OK, here it is: the headphone jack sticks straight up. In my world, it'll get broken sooner or later.

So is the iPod worth it? If you own a PC and adore music on the move, then its cool quotient is beyond reproach; and the capacity beats most other players (though Creative Labs says its own are larger, but didn't have one for testing). Yes, it's expensive. Yes, you could buy other things with that money. So ask yourself: do you want to carry your music collection around with you? If so, it's far ahead of the pack.

http://www.samsungelectronics.com/ digital_audio_player/yepp/yp_30s.html

http://www.apple.com/ipod