Priceless and unused

A couple of months back, I pre-ordered the Samsung-P2. Well, no one knew about it and everyone else was talking about the Ipod Touch, and so, I thought : "Why not try it out ?!" Ofcourse, there were other reasons like integrated Bluetooth that very few other players have on them.That means painless music copying from your home computer or from another bluetooth enabled device. Finally, the player was (somewhat) silently launched in November '07 and Amazon promptly mailed me my box. The good feeling that you usually have when you get yourself something new lasted just for the day. Why ? Well, P2 by default used the Microsoft Transfer Protocol (It's actually Media Transfer Protocol but I prefer the former). If you have never heard about it, see Wikepedia or just ask me : It's your worst nightmare come true. Not because, it's a bad design but because it's relatively new compared to USB Mass Storage Device class . So, things that you have been used to, such as plugging in your USB flash disk and assume that a window would pop up with the contents of the disk no longer worked, especially if you are on Linux or (for that matter) older versions of Windows. Since, I can't afford to buy a copy of Windows just for my media player, I finally let my P2 rot. But, not long.

You can actually make the switch from MTP to UMS by a simple configuration file. You can read more about it here That means you can just plug in the P2 to your Linux box and you can get the same magically-popping window! Now I just copy over my music and videos to my device and it's ready to play. Firmware upgrades are super-sexy too: Just copy over the firmware files to the P2 and the device upgrades the firmware on its own! Now, this is what you call flexibility. Only if others learn something from the P2 and infuse in their own improvements, there would be media player bliss on this planet.

Hey, you got to look at some videos of P2 in action.