The YH-925 relies on Napster's eponymous software for music management. You can also drag and drop songs to the player, but if you don't install Samsung's driver first, they won't play. Napster is an attractive, full-featured program, and the integrated to-go service represents a decidedly tempting alternative to iTunes. For £9.95 per month, you can fill your player to the brim with songs from Napster's million-plus library. The YH-925 will also work with the more affordable Yahoo Music Unlimited service.
To view photos on the player, you'll need the included Multimedia Studio utility. It automatically converts batches of photos to the proper size and downloads them to the player. Inexplicably, however, the Samsung YH-925 can't play slide shows on its own -- you have to create them first in Multimedia Studio.
Playlists are another story: you can easily create one right on the device just by holding down the Select button for any album, artist or track. Alas, Samsung hasn't fixed the last model's bugs -- when you add an artist to the playlist, only a few random tracks actually show up. And when you add an album, songs are listed alphabetically rather than in their native order.
Performance
The bigger problems, however, are sound quality and battery life. The Samsung YH-925 lasted just under than 10 hours in our battery tests -- better than we expected, given the addition of a colour screen, but 5 hours less than the latest iPod. What's more, as with the YH-920, many of our songs sounded ragged and hollow. Something about the player sucks the warmth out of music. And some of the settings actually introduce distortion, so fiddling with the equaliser and SRS settings just makes things worse. At least music transfers were impressive, coming in at a brisk 4.3MB per second over USB 2.0.
If you're less interested in fidelity than you are in a low price, as well as compatibility with lots of music stores and services, the Samsung YH-925 doesn't disappoint. But we think Samsung should work on correcting the player's flaws before introducing a YH-930.
Edited by James Kim
Additional editing by Nick Hide
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User reviews4
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Phil Mollicone 21 November 2006
Good: Nice size, 20GB is plenty of space, robust
Bad: You get only 2 hours from 10 hours advertised battery life. Bothersome charger.
Comment: I got this to transcribe my old vinyl onto MP3. It works OK for that, but I can't find a way to rename/manage the resulting files. So I have a huge, long list of files under "line-in recordings" and have to scroll through to find what I want. Firmware was recently upgraded to Napster compatability, but the process was very fiddly. It holds photos, but is not compatible wtih my camera, so I had to buy an additional hard drive for photo storage on holiday. OK for music, but I think better is out there now.
ZF-B 24 October 2006
Good: Sharp colour, voice recorder
Bad: Battery life is far too short
Comment: If the battery life could be extended to 15 hours and if it was made thinner and more compact, the Samsung YH-925 would be ideal.
Ray Szajewski 23 September 2006
Good: Very easy to use. Large screen. Easy interface
Bad: No clear instruction on how to produce a mobile playlist
Comment: Bought it in June this year at a great discount. I think it has excellent playback and good sound, and it's very easy to use. I have no problems playing any WMA/MP3 and no problems with files or photos. I'm really glad I bought it. Well done Samsung. Highly recommended
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