Samsung YP-Z5 (2GB) user reviews
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User reviews4
Phil Hazelton 27 March 2007
Good: Styling, audio quality, format support
Bad: Critically flawed battery, lack of support from Samsung
Comment: This has the potential to be a fantastic product, but beware: it does have its flaws.
The battery life is advertised at ~40 hours, and playing continuously I have managed to eke around 30 out of it. But the problem is, this is not how most people use their MP3 players. Usually, you would listen to it for a few hours (I use mine on the journey to/from college every day) and the rest of the time it's turned off. Or is it?
See, Samsung put in a very handy "standby" mode, which means that the player boots lightning fast. Lovely. The problem comes with the power consumption of this mode. It seems to suck almost as much power out of the device as it does when it's turned on. The device only turns itself off properly after 24 hours; the user has absolutely no say in this.
The upshot is that if you use your player once or twice a day, as I do, it's very likely that it will be sat in standby mode pretty much all the time. As a result, I can only expect to get around 3-4 hours of actual usage, before I'm told that the battery is too low, and the device refuses to turn on.
The other pain is the horrendously inaccurate power display. It has four settings: 'full', 'almost full', 'almost empty', and 'off'. Of the three working settings, it seems to stay on full for around 75% of the time. This means that you can switch off the device one afternoon, whilst it's still reading 'full', pick it up the next morning, and it won't turn on because it's out of juice.
And the worst thing of all is: this isn't a fault, it's just a really, really poor design. It's a shame that Samsung invested so much in the looks of this device (and it does look fantastic) and so little in the actual usability.
The interface is well layed-out, with the only issue for me being a lack of support for looping playlists. By this, I mean you cannot scroll 'up' from 'A' to 'Z', instead you are forced to go through your entire list. It can also become laggy when you load album art onto the device. I would recommend leaving it off: song changes can take up to half a second when the device has to load a new image.
It still gets a 6 despite these issues, but be warned that if your usage pattern is similar to mine, you will not be able to use this device to its full potential.
Kyus Agu-Lionel 14 January 2007
Good: Sounds great. Looks great, intuitive menu trees, doesn't scratch easily, straightforward music transfer, lovely screen, almost as small as a nano
Bad: Almost as small as a nano, touchpad easy to use but not as fast as a clickwheel, no games, no PDA aplications, no radio, no in line recording
Comment: I have the 4GB version and I am infatuated with it. It is small and lightweight. I do have a few minor niggles with it though. Samsung are the main supplier of flash drives for the nano and so I am thinking, why not use the same drives for the YP-Z5? It is almost twice as thick as the iPod and this, I know, is partly due to a bigger battery, but Apple still manages to get 24 hours out of its new nano so why couldn't Samsung have done the same? The touchpad is easy to use but, when traversing my 4GB of music, I wish for the speed of the clickwheel or the Creative Vision m's touch strip. This player was pitched as an 'iPod killer' so if it is such then where are the organiser aplications? Where is the FM tuner? Where are the games? Where is the line in recording and voice recording? Where is the video playback support? But the place where it really excels is in music playback. The provided earphones are excellent quallity and the player sounds great and gets plenty loud!
Lyn Denny 27 December 2006
Good: Ease of use
Bad: Touchpad is fiddly, instructions are useless
Comment: Good, easy to deal with and looks nice too.
George Chamberlain 1 September 2006
Good: The touchpad, the display, the overall design, the battery life
Bad: The lack of an iTunes type interface for the computer
Comment: When you compare this to the iPod nano it beats it hands down. The iPod design is starting to look a bit dated and too simple when compared to the likes of this. It is strikingly similar to the iPod in layout. The dedicated volume buttons are a godsend. The main flaw is the fact that it doesn't have something like iTunes to back it up. if you think of the touchpad as a glorified joystick it starts to make perfect sense and is a joy to use.