I have generally been very happy with my new Samsung YP-MT6Z, until I hit a snag today. From my tests, it seems that the total lengh of all folder names on the device cannot exceed a certain number, on the order of a kilobyte or so. That boils down to, say, 50 decently-named folders. That’s it. No more. Oddly enough, that kind of kills the advertised second use of the device as a means of data transport, seeing how it has more than enough storage, a gigabyte to be precise.

And the best part is, if you have more than that, the player will fail unobviously and gracelessly. It will simply display NO FILE in the LCD and refuse to find or play all my audio files. There is no error message, alerting me to the fact that I might have hit an internal limitation. It also won’t just ignore any extra folders. No, it insists on just ceasing to perform its main function altogether. Great work there, Samsung software engineers.

To top it off, I had the pleasure of speaking with Samsung Technical Support, who, after lenghty “research”, claimed that the device would not support more than one folder. I got the sneaking suspicion that the guy didn’t even know what I meant by “folder”, and terms such as “nesting” or “hierarchy” seemed to give him endless trouble. Yay!

Buyer, beware. It’s a good device if you can live with this limitation, which I will have to.