Samsung YP-S5, MP3 Player Product Review

Reviewed by Sean - "http://goitworld.blogspot.com"

The history of portable MP3 players has already been 10 years since the world’s first portable MP3 player was introduced to the world. MP3 players have evolved a lot since then. Now, MP3 players are no longer a music player. Their features have changed intelligently and conveniently as new technologies are developed. We can’t even imagine how far they will evolve.

I am sure that YP-S5, Samsung’s new mp3 player, would be one of them. I would like to introduce a product review of the Samsung’s YP-S5 model. As I am a normal MP3 player user, I hope this product review is fair, not biased and helpful for you to understand features of the YP-S5 product.

Major changes for YP-S5 from previous MP3 players around the world are the state-of-the-art gift package, practical earphone, simple design, built-in slide-out speakers, Bluetooth support, video support, Datacast support, enhanced sound quality, and easy-to-use user interface and graphics.

State-of-the-art Gift Package
The gift package is made of transparent plastic। Just looking at the package, you can say that the product inside is valuable. Unlike other product packages that are made of cardboard are easy to be thrown away, the plastic carton box of YP-S5 would be one that will be put on a shelf with your accessories in it.

The package includes all the necessary components. Specially, the line-in audio cable enables us to listen to the external audio player through the built-in speakers of YP-S5. The installation CD includes Samsung’s Media Studio, a software application that manages various types of contents such as music, video, lyric, internet contents through DataCast feature in order to be used in YP-S5. The 24-pin USB cable is used both to transfer data between PC and YP-S5, and to charge the built-in battery of YP-S5. However, I am not sure whether a normal 24-pin battery charger used for cellular phones will also work to charge the YP-S5. The manual does not explain about this in detail.

Practical Earphones
Earphones of YP-S5 are designed to be fit in the human ears. I have had so many earphones as other people do. But none of the earphones has satisfied me yet because they do not fit in my ears at all and easily fall off. However, I was surprised that Samsung released an earphone with its products that fits in my ears perfectly. The earbuds looked different from others. It seems that a small protrusion of the earbud keeps the earbud stay firmly in human ears, and keep the sound quality.

The splitter between two earphone lines is also a useful component and prevents the lines from being entangled।

Simple Design and Slide-Out-Built-In Speakers
YP-S5 looks so simple। Other than the 24-pin port and earphone port, there is only one physical button used for power on/off and hold. All other buttons are hidden but operated only by touching the appropriate location on the touch pad below the LCD. The location of the touch buttons and the graphics on the LCD also changes accordingly when the built-in speaker slides out. The speaker unit slides out and in very smoothly. You would feel just like sliding a cell phone.

Although YP-S5 consists of a stereo speaker unit, the thickness of YP-S5 is only 9.6mm. If the speaker unit was not built-in, the thickness would have been only half of the actual size.

Considering the Power button, I wish the button was placed on the right side instead of being placed on the top side. Operating the Power button was not convenient.

Bluetooth Support

I recently bought a Bluetooth stereo headset to utilize the advantage of Bluetooth feature provided by YP-S5। Anyway, I needed a Bluetooth headset। AS instructed in the manual, it was easy to pair the Bluetooth headset with YP-S5। I could wirelessly listen to music and FM stereo radio through the Bluetooth stereo headset. But the video sound did not work wirelessly. I think that the CPU of YP-S5 does not have enough power to decode the video format and Bluetooth function at the same time. The Bluetooth feature is one of the convenient technologies for portable music players since it works wirelessly.

One thing I could not test was to pair YP-S5 with a Bluetooth mobile phone. My mobile phone supports Bluetooth but I could not pair it with YP-S5. I think I need to do more exercise on this, and find out what is wrong. BTW, my mobile phone was not listed on the Bluetooth compliant mobile phone list in the user’s guide.

Video Support
Samsung Media Studio automatically converts a video file to SVI format, the Samsung’s video file format for YP-S5 during download process। As the conversion takes time, you would need more patience if you want to download video files to the player in real time। In order to save time, I would strongly suggest you convert video files before you go to bed or when you have time. The Samsung Media Studio has a feature to do so and turns off PC after conversion. This helps me to watch Heroes, Smallville, and Prison Break series on YP-S5. The LCD is not big enough, but it is still OK to watch videos. I will let this off this time.

Datacast Support
I was not familiar with the term, Datacast. However, I found it a very useful feature. Using Samsung Media Studio, the Datacast feature allows you to automatically receive your interested and updated information from the web, Blog, news, and UCC sites without having you to visit the sites. I could enjoy reading the updated information through YP-S5 instead of reading newspapers in subways when I go to work or when I am not in front of PC.


Enhanced Sound Quality
DNSe is a 3D sound effect that Samsung developed for MP3 players. I could distinguish various sound effects provided by YP-S5 including DNSe. The provided earphones with 20mW and 16Ω also helped enjoying the sound quality.

Easy-to-Use User Interface and Graphics
There are only 7 touch buttons on the touch pad. The seven buttons were enough to browse and navigate all the functions easily. Base on the LCD layout whether displayed horizontally or vertically, the buttons layout on the touch pad also changes horizontally or vertically. Thus, I could recognize which button was the next, left, up, or down button. The button is lit for a while when I touched on the touch pad. This is a good feature. However, I found it needs to be improved. When the light of all the buttons is turned off from the touch pad, sometimes I had to miss-operate buttons since I could not see where the buttons are located.

In conclusion, since MP3 players evolve as new technologies are introduced and support not only playing MP3 music files, but also playing video files, viewing lyric for MP3 contents, viewing text files, playing games, reading Datacast contents (internet contents), communicating with Bluetooth mobile phone and headset (wireless), viewing pictures, listening to FM radio, voice recording, we should name such an MP3 player an omnipotent player in near future.

BTW, in overall, I was quite satisfied with Samsung’s YP-S5 product.
-Reviewed by Sean - http://goitworld.blogspot.com/