Though it's just the size of a matchbox (the kind that you might have seen in classy restaurants before smoking got banned), the YP-T7 comes with a Sears catalog of features. It plays MP3s as well as Microsoft's WMAs—even the protected ones you purchase for 99 cents from the new Napster and other Microsoft-powered legal download services. It has a built-in FM tuner and a voice recorder with mic and line input. Thanks to a peanut-butter-and-chocolate-style merger, you can also schedule recordings of radio broadcasts, like a tiny TiVo for FM buffs. (Just be sure the player is sitting in an area with good radio reception when it's doing its thing.)  

Topping the product's bullet-point list is its color screen with photo-display capability. It can be seen as a major technology statement for a player of this size, but it's still more like icing on cake. The screen is 96 x 96 pixels square—smaller than the average cell-phone LCD. Also, you can't display images on a TV screen, as you can on more expensive photo players. Hard truths aside, it's a fun novelty, and geekier proud parents or pet owners would, no doubt, embrace it.  

The photo-loading software provided by Samsung is functional but awkward. It will automatically shrink JPEGs before uploading. To avoid a "letterbox" effect, however, you have to first crop shots by hand into a square shape, using the clumsy photo-editing tools. Sounds innocuous, until you accidentally save your work and wind up with square originals.  

For music, you can use Windows Media 10 or Napster. Since it appears as a USB drive, you can also load songs manually. (Samsung packages its own proprietary jukebox software, too, but I wouldn't recommend adding yet another music manager to the four or five you probably already have on your PC.)  

Once everything is loaded, finding your way around the player can be frustrating. Under the heading Navigation, there's a list of folders which don't always contain what you expect. (For instance, a folder marked IMAGE contains nothing, even after you've loaded the player up with pictures.) Scroll past the folders and you finally see a list of song files, without mention of tag information like artist or album. At one point, after playing something I'd used the voice recorder to create, I had a hard time getting back to my music. It takes time, and an appreciation of the unnecessarily technical, to learn this player's ropes. (To Samsung's credit, you can create play lists on the fly, and scrolling is fairly quick, even through long lists.)  

The YP-T7 has attained an evolutionary peak with its small size and abundance of tech specs. It costs $50 more than Apple's iPod Shuffle and offers at least $50 worth of extra stuff in the deal. I appreciate how hard engineers must have worked on this, but I would have preferred some attention go to a smoother way of integrating it all.