Samsung S2 Pebble MP3 Player
Review by Robert Young-Pullman | Published July 2008 | Review Archives

Henry Ford was a pretty smart guy. When he began rolling his Model T car off the assembly line, he famously reveled in his near-monopoly on the automobile industry by saying that customers could buy a car "in any color as long as it's black". His competitors were smarter. One, who later founded General Motors, realized that items which begin as luxury products eventually become mass commodities for everyone. And then if people want their car in candy apple red, you better be able to give it to them.

Most MP3 players are still box-looking products, but that's about to change as they become mass commodities and people want them their way. The Samsung S2 (popularly known as the "Pebble") is a revolution in design, breaking out of the rectangular grid with a sleek, metalic shape roughly the size and weight of a small, flat rock.

Presently available only in South Korea, a co-worker smuggled in a Pebble from a relative and sadly parted with it for a day for me to play with. While somewhat awkward at first - it's just so tiny - after 24 hours, I couldn't imagine living without it. The Pebble fits easily in a shirt pocket without even filling it. The controls on the flat side are both easy to use and very instinctual. It comes with 1 GB of memory - not much, but at $40 bucks, hardly a deal breaker. In fact, the price point is almost as important as the design in making this product such a big deal. This isn't a product for Circuit City but behind the counter at the drug store or the airport newsstand, cheap enough to almost be disposable. It won't replace your iPod, but the availability of such cheap, sleek mp3 players may replace (or force them to evolve) the iPod as we know it.