Samsung YP-Z5 4GB Review

The display is quite vibrant and bright when compared to the iPod nano, and is better suited for showing off photos to your friends. The larger display has its drawbacks however. For one, images aren't as smooth since the resolution is actually 12% lower than the iPod nano at 128x160 versus 176x132 and stretched over more surface area. Also, the larger screen leaves less room for the controls which feel rather compact.

Out of Control
While the control set Samsung chose for the YP-Z5 is very intuitive, it simply doesn't work as expected. Like most MP3 players, there's the hold switch and dedicated play/pause/power, menu, and forward/back buttons, as well as a touch pad for navigation. However, the touchpad doubles as a tactile select button, and requires more force than usual to track your thumb as it moves across the rather confined pad, resulting in jittery movement and accidental scrolling when trying to click a selection. If you manage to see one in stores, try zooming in on a picture and dragging it across the screen and you'll see what I mean.

Scrolling is also a pain with the YP-Z5. Whereas the other touchpad players allow you to drag your thumb across the touchpad for fine selection and hold it (or continue dragging) for fast selection, Samsung requires that you tap the touchpad over and over for fine selection over a few items. Tapping away, without all of your taps even registering because it requires more pressure than usual. Personally, I can't get used to this, although I'm thankful that coarse scrolling by holding the edges of the pad is still available.

On the plus side, the volume isn't controlled by the touchpad, but rather a dedicated volume rocker on the side that lines up with your thumb perfectly. Too many times with the iPod have I accidentally blasted my eardrums when I thought I was scrolling through my playlists, whereas this is impossible with the YP-Z5.

Clean Interface

Control issues aside, Paul Mercer did an extraordinary job with the YP-Z5's menus. Everything is where you'd expect it to be, the music can be sorted through by the usual artists, albums, composers, genres and titles, and album art is a click away from the Now Playing screen. Holding the menu button down goes to the first Menu screen, for quicker access to settings and pictures.

Each menu screen is also beautiful in its own right with rounded edges, transparency with contrasting colors for the selected menu item, and oversized icons for the main menu. Additionally, the background wallpaper can be changed by holding down the selection button on any image in the gallery, each of which can also be zoomed and panned across for viewing, or displayed in a slide show. Strangely enough however, any album art that was included in the ID3 tags via iTunes (and displayed properly in Windows Media Player nonetheless) would not show in the Now Playing screen.

Z5 Audio, Transfer Speeds & Battery Life
As far as sound goes, Samsung did their homework with the YP-Z5. To me, the sound was good with a nice amount of bass although somewhat lacking on the treble, although that's nothing a quick equalizer setting can't fix. There are eight EQ settings to choose from, as well as three virtual 3D settings to match your tastes in music.

In the car over my tape adapter I found myself listening to the Normal EQ setting most often in order to conserve battery life, although through the supplied earbuds I felt that 3D-Club was best suited for my Rock and Trance tastes. Audiophiles will lament the missing option to create custom equalizers, although personally that's a feature I can do without.

Transfer speeds weren't anything to go crazy over, although they weren't that bad either. Using Windows Media Player to transfer a large chunk of my music collection, it took 17m:52s to copy over 653 MP3s encoded at various bitrates, totaling 3.14GB or 49 hours. That's roughly 24Mbps in real-world usage, fast enough to sync up for the day while you eat your breakfast. For those who care only about raw performance, it took 13m:48s for a 3.64GB ISO renamed to an MP3 file 13m:48s to copy over, about 36 Mbps.

Battery life was exceptional. Just as it is with the iPod, you can't change the battery like you can with Creative's Zen Micro or iRiver's H10, but the 35-hour battery was more than enough to hold me over for several days driving around Southern California without a recharge. In continuous usage testing using the same 3.14GB of MP3s set to shuffle and a somewhat loud volume setting, I found the YP-Z5 lasted for 36 hours and 18 minutes before dying. Of course, the battery life varies tremendously with your usage patterns.

Lacking in the Extras Dept.
So far the Samsung YP-Z5 has done a fair job in every category except control and custom EQs (a feature I could do without anyway). What kills it however is the lack of extras that every other player in this price range has. For a Windows Media-based device, where is the FM radio and voice recorder? For an iPod killer, where are the games? For both, where is the contact list, calendar synchronization, and USB data storage? For an equally-priced player looking to compete against the current leaders, such an abundant lack of features feels like a rather large oversight.

Unfortunately that's not all that's missing. On-the-go playlists, something a lot of people use for their workout routines or road-rage-inducing commute through rush hour traffic is also missing. Instead, you can only make playlists before you sync up the player through Windows Media Player. Ouch.

Recap
Samsung definitely has the brains to pull off an iPod killer, and they were so close to actually succeeding that it makes me cringe to see what amounts to a bare-bones digital audio player. While the YP-Z5 has the right dimensions, look, storage capacity and price, the sheer number of missing features gives a strong sense of buyer's remorse. No data storage, no games, no contact/calendar synchronization, no FM or microphone recording, and no custom EQs set the YP-Z5 way behind other MP3 players in its class. Add in one of the worst control systems I've ever dealt with and I'd advise you to stay far away from this one.