Samsung YP-P3 MP3 Player (8GB, 16GB) Review

A PMP in Business Attire
While the YP-P3 DAP shares the same form factor and screen size as the YP-P2, that is where most of the similarities end. Thanks in no small part to the metal casing, the latest Yepp MP3 player commands a ton of respect with a sense of ruggedness that only a handful of competing players can offer in today's world of molded plastics. Samsung has also tweaked the button configuration from the P2, combining the hold switch and power toggle into a single button then moving it along with the volume rocker to the player's top alongside the newly-added speaker. This is a marked improvement that works wonders for both lefties and righties.

Measuring 5.25 cm wide with a thickness of 1 cm, the P3 maintains a lithe, lightweight appearance that is easy to grasp for hands of all sizes. It's more compact than the iPod touch 1G/2G in comparison, but noticeably larger than the 4th generation iPod nano due to its larger screen.

The bottom of the P3 plays host to Samsung's proprietary docking connector, the headphone port, and a built-in microphone/reset hole. A polished strip of metal runs the course of the device's perimiter accenting the svelte lines, and is subtle enough that greasy smudges aren't noticeable. So yes, with the obvious exception of the touchscreen controls, the YP-P3 is a fingerprint free player. Hooray!

Surrounding the indented 480x272 3-inch touchscreen and mini-controls area is a black bezel that provides a slick contrast to the player's casing in both the black and silver variants. Traditionally I find myself purchasing the black versions of consumer electronics on everything from gameboys to computer monitors, but the bezel's contrast has such a nice effect that I find myself preferential to the silver version of the P3. As for that redundant indicator light on the front of the P2 predecessor that looks like a button but isn't, it was replaced by a conservative Samsung logo that offers 100% less confusion. There's no question about it, the P3 really does look sharp, so my kudos go out to the product's design team.

Samsung P3 stacked on top of the iPod touch (1G).

You'll find the hold/power button, volume controls, and the external speaker on top of the Samsung P3.

Of Capacitance and Haptics
The Samsung P3's primary means of control is through a capacitive glass touchscreen similar to the what's used on the iPod touch and BlackBerry Storm. While more durable than the resistive touchscreens made of plastic that are seen on many PDAs and the Nintendo DS, capactive touch requires that your bare fingers and thumbs be used to control the player, which in and of itself has two cons going for it. Gloves and thumbnails are out, and digits even as thin as mine are unable to accurately control the player. I've been getting better over the two weeks that I've used the player, but it still can be frusterating when the player refuses to accurately click where I want it to.

Updating the firmware to version 2.07 or greater should help with this a bit, offering improvements to both touch accuracy and the speed of navigation. The newer version 1.28 is said to have even greater control, but that excludes many of the other features offered in 2.07. Hopefully Samsung merges the two development branches for the best of both worlds in the near future. The other possible remedy for accuracy (and warmth during winter months) is to use one of the electrically conductive accessories that have been making their rounds in online shops for iPhones. So far I've come across three sets of specialty gloves that should fit the bill as well as a capacitive stylus.

The biggest improvement over the YP-P2 in my opinion comes from the addition of Immersion's TouchSense haptics technology, also known as rumble vibration(tm). In essence, when you touch the screen it will rumble a faux "click" as if you're actually depressing a button and then feeling it spring back as you let go. Swiping your finger across the screen to scroll or flip through pages produces a short rolling sensation, and dragging slider bars produces a clicking sensation to indicate continuous movement. I cannot emphasize enough just how well the haptics work for the P3, as it gives you a feeling that you're actually interacting with a functional device and not just a slab of glass. Lastly there is the VibeWoofer gimmick, which will cause the player to vibrate in sync with the bass hits of your music and videos. It was cool for about five minutes before I switched it back off.

Youthful Interface
The Samsung P3 fully supports customization through Samsung's UCI, or User Customiziable Interface. Backgrounds and startup screens are the typical targets here, but these can also be coupled with new icons to create downloadable UCI packages that are available through Samsung and a few 3rd party sites across the internet. Samsung hosts both their own professionally created UCIs as well as a variety of user created UCIs, so not surprisingly there's the usual mix of Windows, Apple, and BlackBerry themed packages out there to download from as well. This creative functionality should be added to Samsung's EmoDio software for users outside of Korea shortly after the player's USA release.

User-created Blackberry storm theme on the left; Hello Kitty UCI on the right.

One of the new additions to the P3 is the inclusion of Widgets, or small applets that can provide useful information, quick access to system settings, or simple decoration. Their practicality however is limited, as the player does not have internet access for downloading live information such as weather and movie showtimes. Also, as of March 09 there are currently no means of downloading new widgets so unless you are overly thrilled with poking a butterfly that zooms across your screen, I wouldn't put too much thought into the widgets as a selling point for the P3, not yet anyway.

Widgets on the left; main menu screen on the right.

Of course, part of customization is not just tweaking what you see, but how you see it. To that end Samsung has enabled repositioning icons and widgets on up to 5 virtual desktops, accessed by swiping your thumb across the screen to access the next desktop. If no icons or widgets are present on a virtual desktop, it will vanish from sight until you try dragging something back onto one. This allows for easy grouping of items by functionality and removes clutter.

Apart from the stop-n-go scrolling, the interface itself is pretty snappy thanks to the use of shortcuts. From anywhere within the player, taping once on something that's not an icon or button will present contextual menus on the bottom of the screen, and tapping on the top of the screen will present shortcuts for managing the Bluetooth, audio and display output as well as navigating directly to the home screen. Likewise, from the Home screen holding down the Music or Movies icons will skip directly to their respective now playing screens.

One more shortcut present on the P3 is the mini-player, accessed by swiping your thumb across the arrows located directly underneath the screen. Doing this will show controls for play/pause and ff/rwd/skip much like the iPod touch has a mini-player accessible by double clicking the menu button. Unlike the iPod touch however, the P3 must be unlocked in order to get to the controls.

Rock Out
Out of the box, the YP-P3 supports a multitude of audio formats such as OGG Voribs, FLAC lossless, AAC and AAC+, all supplementing the classic MP3 and WMA formats. What Samsung doesn't tell you however is that neither its EmoDio desktop software nor the MP3 player itself can read ID3 tags from songs encoded in the AAC or FLAC formats. This has the adverse effect of making it so that those tracks can't be navigated to via the music database where songs are browseable by artist, album, title and genre.

Of course, you can still get to your AAC and FLAC songs via the File Browser, but anyone who's had the displeasure of working with MP3 CDs and car stereos with USB support should already be well versed with the frustrations inherent in doing so; though the handful of users that don't bother to maintain their ID3 tags aren't likely to care. I'm not saying that Samsung shouldn't advertise their AAC and FLAC support, I actually encourage that much. I just wish that they would have actively put the same effort into fully supporting those two codecs as they have with the underdog OGG Voribs codec. The other major issue in Sammy's implementation of music is the inability to read many but not all of the album art photos I've embedded into my ID3 tags via iTunes. Hey, if Windows Media Player can read them, why can't Samsung? Hopefully a firmware update and EmoDio patch will resolve these issues in the future.

File browser on the left; play speed adjustment on the right.

Music lovers will rejoice at the number of playback features to be found within the P3's music functionality. A-B repeat and the ability to adjust the playback speed without altering the pitch makes creating music tableture much easier, while on-the-go playlists are always a welcome addition for long road trips. The built-in mono speaker is also nice for sharing the gist of a song with a friend and not having to surrender your waxy earbuds. Speaking of which, do yourself a favor and buy another pair of earbuds to go with the P3. The ones that come bundled have muddy mids and highs that don't do vocal tracks justice. Samsung rates the P3's battery life at 30 hours when listening to MP3s encoded at 128kbps with the voulume halved, sound effects disabled and the screen off. In my own testing, I managed to squeeze out just over 36 hours of continuous playback when listening to a variety of music encoded at various bitrates from 128kbps to 320kBps CBR and even a few tracks encoded with variable bitrates.

Worth a 2nd Listen
What really impressed me about the YP-P3 is that it's the first Yepp player to make use of the 3rd generation of Samsung's the Digital Natural Sound Engine, or DNSe 3.0. For the rest of us, that's fancy talk for an equalizer engine. Ah, but this is no ordinary equalizer, as it actually IMPROVES upon the sound and doesn't clip the hell out of it. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is an equalizer that I actually appreciate having switched on.

So what makes DNSe 3.0 so special? For starters, it's able to automatically apply what it thinks is is the best of the 11 DNSe presets based off of the Genre ID3 tag. So when I'm rocking out to Iron Maiden, the P3 automatically applies the Rock preset. When I'm listening to Trance music, it applies the Club preset. Simple, right? It's not 100% perfect since a handful of songs will find themselves overly boomy if the Rock preset is automatically applied, but this is still a great feature to be had for those of us who like to leave our players on Shuffle.

DNSe presets on the left; DNSe customization on the right.

Next, DNSe 3.0 gives you the power to create up to three custom DNSe presets directly on the device. A standard 7-band EQ is present as well as options for tweaking the Bass level, 3D and concert hall (reverb) effects, as well as the clarity effect. Clarity is special because it happens to make everything sound appreciably sharper when set to level 1. Additional DNSe settings can be created on the PC via the EmoDio software and then copied to the device's DNSe folder if you're that dedicated.

Another sound effect is the Audio Upscaler, which restores many of the higher frequencies that are lost during lossy compression into MP3. It's a subtle difference, but with a decent pair of headphones I was able to hear the difference when listening to the quiet sections of Ænema by Tool encoded at 160kbps in MP3. The last sound effect there is to cover is Street Mode, which raises the levels of the mids and highs so they can supposedly come across more clearly on a noisy urban street. I don't consider myself an audiophile by any stretch of the means, but Street Mode seems to introduce so much noticeable distortion that I personally find it better to simply keep it off and raise the volume at the expesne of my long term hearing. Oh well. ;)

Grab the Popcorn
As a portable media player, it's only sensible to expect that Samsung's P3 be able to play video files, and it does. What makes the YP-P3 special is its ability to play most videos that you already have on your computer, without conversion. WMV, H.264, MPEG-4, DivX, and Xvid are all supported by the hardware decoder after updating to the latest 2.07 firmware, the latter three codecs capable of resolutions up to 800x600. This means all the videos that you legally backed up from DVD and most of the videos you've acquired from *cough* other sources will work fine too. And though I'm hesitant to mention it due to my disdain for the codec, Real Video RMVB is also supported albeit by software decoding. GenerationMP3 has put together a nice excel sheet for their own review detailing the full breadth of what's now supported by the 2.07 firmware.

Playback is exceptionally smooth with vibrant color and the WQVGA screen's aspect ratio a perfect fit for widescreen movies with no black bars. 4:3 videos have the option of being left in their original formatting, stretched to fit, or zoomed in with the vertical extemeties cropped out. Visusally, the only downside I can find to the P3's video playback is a subtle screendoor effect that tends to get lost in action films anyway.

Jumping to a specific point in a long video can either be done by tapping a segment of the progress bar or by activating the Mosaic Search feature. Mosaic Search is a cool little feature that displays up to 64 still frames at once, serving much the same purpose as chapter markers would in a DVD. And just as it can with music, the P3 is able to adjust the playback speed of video with 5 levels of fast and slow. Bookmarks and auto-resume are also available for use on the move, so you can quickly get back into the action without searching for it.

Making a circle gesture on the touchscreen when watching a video will display a virtual jog-wheel to find the perfect still frame and then capture it as a JPEG for use as a photo or wallpaper, though the jog-wheel can be a bit misleading since it can only advance forward, not backward. Even so, I must say that I am impressed by all the video functionality showcased in the P3; Sammy certainly knows how to keep videoholics happy. Samsung rates the battery life at 5 hours for video with halved volume, brightness and flat sound, though they did not mention what codecs and bitrates they used to acheive this. Looping my own copy of Bender's Game encoded in Xvid at 672x368 (980kbps), I was only able to acheive 3 hours and 50 minutes of playback time.

Podcasts Datacasts
Samsung has integrated DataCast support into the P3, better known to the rest of us as podcasts, but I'll entertain Samsung's contempt of the "pod" prefix for now. If you can find an RSS feed with MP3 or Video attachments to subcribe to, the bundled EmoDio software will automatically download the Datacasts and load them onto the player. What struck me as odd though is when I tried subscribing to The Onion's video datacast, I was forced to convert the videos into Samsung's proprietary .SVI format before EmoDio would "hotsync" the datacast to the player. (You're infringing Palm's trademark, Samsung!) This in-turn required me to download and install the "MyFree Codec Pack" that EmoDio recommended, nevermind the fact that I already have the widely acclaimed Combined Community Codec Pack installed on my computer. In any case once the datacast eventually got synced to the P3, the video's quality was still intact, but all of this is overly redundant when the P3 had native support for MP4 files even before the 2.07 firmware update was released.

Picture Me This
Photo support on the Yepp P3 isn't much different than what's available on other PMPs. JPEG, BMP, PNG, and non-animated GIF images can all be displayed on the P3 and presented in a slide show with various transitions. By default, photos are automatically rotated to best fit the screen, but to manually rotate a photo you will need to drag your thumb across the screen in a circle since there is no built-in accelerometer to detect the player's orientation. Thankfully Samsung didn't skimp on the pan and zoom controls, a feature that I think would be standard by now. From the photo gallery it is possible to transverse folder hierarchies as well as select photos for use as the wallpaper or startup screen.

Without an accelerometer, Samsung P3's on-screen controls cannot change their orientation automatically.

Bluetooth Wireless Freedom
Samsung has opted to use Bluetooth instead of WiFi as a major selling point for the YP-P3, but to be honest I just can't find myself using it that much with the current limitations of the 2.07 firmware. Four profiles are supported for use: Handsfree Profile, Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP), Audio/Video Remote Control Profile, and the Object Push Profile over OBEX. I'll break down my findings for each of the three profiles:

When paired with a phone as a handsfree device, the P3 enables you to leave your wired earbuds in while taking a call and using the built-in microphone to speak with the other caller. Basic funcitonality like dialing, redialing, and transferring the call from the P3 to the phone is all supported as well as dialing from the address book on the MP3 player, but the abilities to voicedial and enter numbers (DTMF codes) after the call has started are noticeably absent. Handsfree range and audio quality was comprarable to traditional headsets, which isn't great but is possibly limited by my phone itself. Using the P3 next to the noggin isn't a possibility since the built-in speaker isn't supported, so expect to look a little goofy when using the P3 with your phone.

Samsung P3 paired up with HTC cellphone via Bluetooth.

Next up is the A2DP and AVRCP profiles that enable the use of wireless headphones at the expense of battery life. Ordinarily I would be enthused to see this feature directly integrated into an MP3 player without the need for an external dongle, but sadly Samsung just didn't implement it all too well. During my testing with a pair of Sony DR-BT22a and Motorola S805 wireless headphones, I found the P3's audio quality to be so compressed that cymbal crashes sounded god-awful and cleanly sung vocals were so scratchy it sounded as if Nightwish's lead singer came down with a bad case of laryngitis. Again, I've already lost some hearing and am not an audiophile, but these compression artifacts are so apparent it sends chills down my spine to hear them.

Samsung P3 paired up with a pair of Bluetooth headphones.

Granted, the Bluetooth audio quality was better than what my HTC Touch Diamond has to offer at stock settings, but at least the WinMo PDA could boost the bitrate to CD-quality via registry edits. Hopefully Samsung releases a firmware update that bumps the bitrate up to acceptable levels in the future. Non-vocal trance music seemed to be unaffected by the compression for the most part, and basic controls found on the headphones for play, pause, stop, and skipping tracks were all supported without issue. Also, some of the early forum posts for this device indicate that DNSe equalizer presets are not able to be used with Bluetooth headphones; this is no longer the case. Every stock and user-created DNSe preset as well as sound effects are able to be used with Bluetooth.

Finally we have the Object Push Profile for sending files from the P3 to other Bluetooth-enabled devices, because sharing is caring. ^_^ This works exactly as it sounds: select any file loaded on the player, pick a bluetooth device to send it to, then wait while the file is transferred. The P3 is also able to receive files, simplifying the process of transferring .VCF contacts from a phone to the player for future lookup and dialing.

Extras
Sammy has a number of utilities embedded in the P3's firmware that allow it to double as a nifty litte PDA of sorts, and even a miniature gaming platform. Starting with the PDA functions, we have a basic alarm clock with MP3 support, the address book, a voice recorder that records stereo MP3s at 128kbps, a calculator, a calendar widget that's compatible with Outlook/Mozilla/iCal *.ics files, a memo pad widget with frustratingly slow typing, a world clock, and believe it or not a subway map for many major cities across the world except Los Angeles.

P3's calculator on the left; textpad on the right.

Tons of subway maps on the P3.

P3's FM radio on the left; alarm on the right.

Moving on to the fun extras, seven games are pre-installed on the P3 with everything from a jigsaw puzzle and Sudoku to a shooter game and virtual bubblewrap. User-created Adobe Flash games can also be loaded onto the player in .SWF format, but you'll have to keep the design pretty simplistic. Stock, the only .SWF file pre-loaded is a virtual metronome for listeners that can't keep a beat. With the introduction of the 2.07 firmware, we now have a Sketch Book that is so frustrating to use with a capacitive touch screen that I would only recommend it if you have slender hands or a compatible stylus. Seriously, it's hard. After all my practiced years of drawing with a with crayons and an Etch-A-Sketch, I can't even color a basic house with a sun in the corner... *sniff*... I think I'm going to go cry now.

Bubble smile mini game on the left; Soduku on the right.

One last feature to note is the ability for the Yepp P3 to play Text-to-Speech (TTS) files. The synthesized voices offered by Samsung sound surprisingly natural, and a number of male and female voices are available for different languages including 3 sets of English for American, British, and Austrailian accents. What sucks though is that this technology will soon be kaput. Effective March 31st and coinciding with the P3's April launch in America, Samsung will no longer be offering downloads of the voice packs required for converting plaintext files into TTS. In all likelyhood, this loss of functionality can be attributed to the fallout between Amazon.com's Kindle 2 eBook reader and the Authors Guild who threw a hissy fit when they learned that people could convert text to speech without paying additional royalties. Wankers. Samsung's probably just trying to avoid the impending litigation from the same. We'd mirror the TTS packs here at Everything USB if it weren't for our servers being located in America, but maybe we'll get lucky and someone will seed the packs on BitTorrent. Streisand effect, anyone?

Recap
The Samsung YP-P3 is actually a knockout of a portable media player. True, it may not have the WiFi or custom application support going for it, but the native video codec support and numerous music playback abilities knock the socks off of an iFruit. What's more, the 3rd iteration of the Digital Natural Sound Engine (DNSe) sounds absolutely incredible! The integrated Bluetooth has great potential, but for now is limited by an inadequate bitrate for stereo playback and lack of certian handsfree abilities like voice dialing. I'd also like to see better support for FLAC and AAC when it comes to reading ID3 tags, but at least the codecs are there. Highly recommended for music and movie afficionados alike.