Portable Digital MP3 Player Product Review: Samsung Haptic YP-P3
Samsung is ready to launch a new stylish MP3 player called YP-P3. The nickname of the YP-P3 player is “Haptic”. Haptic means “touching” in Greek. The concept of Haptic is that by touching the player, users can feel the vibration of the player. Actually, it did. I was quite surprised when I touched the LCD screen. I felt a little vibration and thought there was a gap between the top and bottom cases. The vibration feature must be an attraction point. As you can see by the name of the player, P3 is the next generation of P2. The design of P3 is pretty much similar to P2 but it is much more stylish and user friendly. Some features of P3 that I like are the built-in speaker and TTS (Text to Speech) feature in the Text and Datacast menu.
Now, let’s explore P3.
Package
The gift package is a well designed tiny box as for the previous products. It includes the YP-P3 player, USB data cable, earphones, Installation CD and a warrantee card.
Appearance and Design
P3 is slim and thin. The dimension is 102 x 52 x 9.9mm and 96 grams. The metal body, tempered glass and the hairline on the back make P3 dandy and valuable. The 3” TFT 16:9 wide QVGA touch screen is large enough to navigate all necessary information, and to display vivid images through 16M colors.
The top side is composed of the Power/Hold, Volume up, Volume down buttons, and built-in speaker. The speaker is very useful when using the player without earphones. There is no need to purchase additional speakers.
The bottom side has the Reset/Microphone hole, 24-pin port for USB data transfer and charging, and 3.5 pie earphone connection port. There is no button on the left and right sides.
Just below the touch screen LCD on the front panel, there is so called ‘mini-player touch area’ which displays the mini-player slide horizontally.
Attractive Main Menu
The desktop is composed of the main menu screens. The icons on the main menu are colorful, clean and well organized. The user interface is more intelligent and friendly than previous models.
The memo function works just like Post-It. Some important information like meeting schedules can be written in the Memo page. The brightness of the LCD can be also adjusted directly by touching the light bulb.
To change the screen, the ‘EmoTure’ feature does it all. EmoTure is a shortened word for emotional gesture. EmoTure offers various ways to communicate with the touch screen by tapping, flicking and dragging.
DNSe 3.0 Support
DNSe 3.0 stands for Digital Natural Sound Engine that Samsung developed recently. DNSe 3.0 tried to recover the original sound quality as much as possible. During the encoding process to make MP3 files from an audio CD, the sound quality is reduced. In order to restore the missing sound to as much as the original sound quality, Samsung developed DNSe 3.0 and adapted to the current MP3 players.
VibeWoofer Effect
One of the newest features is VibeWoofer. Some cellular phones have similar feature to VibeWoofer but P3 would be the first MP3 player implementing the VibeWoofer feature. Once it is enabled, P3 vibrates while music is being played, or when operating buttons.
Music Menu
Music can be found in the File Browser and Music menus. The lyric of music can be displayed on the screen once the lyric is added to the music file using the EmoDio software provided by Samsung.
Picture Menu
Just like recent ordinary MP3 players, P3 supports photo files in JPEG, PNG and BMP format. Since the LCD provides 16M colors, the images are much vivid and clear.
Video Support
The video CODECs that P3 can support are MPEG4 (AVI, SVI), H.264 (M4V), and WMV9 (WMV). I have tried some AVI and WMV files, but P3 could not play them. Those files must have unsupported CODECs. In such case, I used Samsung’s music management software called “EmoDio”. Using EmoDio, video files were automatically converted to SVI format which is the Samsung’s video file format to play from P3.
TTS and Text/Datacast Support
Text and Datacast are very useful features. Both of them display text information. Using the EmoDio software, the Datacast feature automatically receives interesting and recent news from the WEB, Blog, NEWS, and UCC sites without having visited the sites. I could enjoy reading the updated information through P3 instead of reading the actual newspapers. The texts can be displayed vertically or horizontally. Since multitasking is provided by P3, I could listen to the music while reading the text. In addition to reading the texts, the EmoDio provides TTS which stands for Text to Speech. Enabling TTS on, the text files or DataCast files are converted into voice files and transferred to P3. This means I could listen to the voice files instead of reading texts.
Flash and Subway Support
The Flash player supports SWF files. Metronome is a sample included in P3. The manual mentioned that some SWF files are not supported. But as far as I tested, P3 could successfully play all the SWF files I had. The worldwide subway maps should be helpful when taking subways.
FM Radio, Calculator, Dictionary and Voce Recording
FM radio is a must feature for MP3 players. The auto scanning and preset modes are convenient to get favorite channels. While listening to FM radio, the FM channel can be recorded as well. Other than FM radio,
Voice recording is another must feature. When having a conversation or lecture, the voice recording feature will provide us to memorize the past.
P3 provides a calculator. When calculating numbers, this is a useful one.
The dictionary provided in P3 is English-English, English-Korean and Korean-English. The dictionary feature might be helpful for learning English and Korean
Built-In Speaker
The 0.8Watt speaker is very useful. Although the speaker supports only mono sound, the sound quality was good and it provided me a freedom from bothersome wires.
Bluetooth 2.1
The Bluetooth 2.1 feature now supports various functions. P3 works great with the Bluetooth.
File Transfer: Using the Bluetooth feature, we can send photos, phone book, and music files without wires.
Wireless Music: We can listen to the music on Bluetooth supported audio systems like car stereo system, headphones or home theater systems.
Bluetooth Games: P3 can play wireless games with other P3s.
Hands Free: Without touching the mobile phones, P3 can receive and make calls.
The manual specified some mobile phones that work with P3. They are:
Samsung: SPH-C3250, SPH-W2700, SPH-V7400, SPH-V6900, SCh-W270, SPH-B5600, SPH-B3200, SGH-X828, SGH-1718, SGH-E908, SGH-U608
LG: LG-KH1000, LG-KV2400, LG-KG90, LG-KG77
SKY: IM-U130
NOKIA: N72
PHILIPS: S900
MOTOROLA: Z3
Games
There are several games that P3 provides. They are Bubble Bang, Bubble Smile, World Car Puzzle, Alggagi, Omok2, PowPow, Sudoku Champ. A number of games are included as new MP3 models are developed.
Leather Pouch (Optional)
The leather pouch above is an optional product. It is not included in the package and it has not been launched on the market yet. The pouch is quite solid and has a magnetic button. It should protect P3 from damage.
Menu Tree
Above is the screen shot of the menu structure from the manual. The menu tree simply shows the structure of P3.
Specification
Audio Format:
MPEG1/2/2.5 Layer 3 (8kbps~320kbps, 22KHz~48KHz)
WMA (8kbps~320kbps, 8KHz~48KHz)
OGG (Q0~Q10)
FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec)
AAC-LC (16kbps~256kbps, 8kHz~48kHz)
AAC-Plus (16kbps~256kbps, 16kHz~44.1kHz)
Enhanced-AAC-Plus (16kbps~56kbps, 32kHz~44.1kHz)
Video Format:
AVI/SVI: MPEG-4 Video (480x272) Simple Profile,
MP3 Audio ( 44.1KHz, 128kbps),
WMV: WMV9 Video (480x272, Max bitrate 860kbps)
MP4: H.264/AVC Video (480x272) Baseline Profile @ Level 1.3, AAC/AAC+ Audio
Image Format:
JPG (Baseline, Progressive), BMP (Max 32bit), PNG, GIF(89a/87a)
Flash: SWF (Flash Player 8.0 or lover, ActionScript 2.0 or lower)
Number of Files: Max. 10,000 (including 4,000 music files)
Number of Folders: Max. 10,000 (including files)
Memory: 4GB/8GB/16GB/32GB
Color: Black/Silver
Dimension (WxDxH): 52.7mm x 102mm x 9.9mm
Weight: 96gram
Case: Tempered Glass, Plastic, Aluminum
LCD: 3” TFT LCD QVGA
Earphone: 20mW/Ch. (at 16 ohm)
Frequency Range: 20Hz~20KHz
Noise to Ratio: 89dB with 20kHz LPF (based on 1kHz 0dB)
Playback Time: Audio: Max. 30Hrs (MP3 at 128kbps, volume at 15, LCD off, and normal sound effect)
Video: Max. 5Hrs (brightness at 5, volume at 15, and normal sound effect)
FM Frequency: 87.5~108.0MHz
FM T.H.D.: 0.8%
FM Signal to Noise Ratio: 45dB
FM Useable Sensitivity: 5dBu
Speaker Power Output: 0.8W Mono
Speaker Impedance: 8 ohm
Speaker Frequency Range: 400Hz~20kHz
Battery Type: 610mAh / DC 3.7V
Pros
Improved User Interface
VibWoofer: A little vibration makes P3 feel alive
Built-in Speaker
Large 3”: TFT LCD
Wonderful DNSe 3.0 sound quality
Advanced Multimedia Technology: Allow users to listen to music and FM radio, view the music lyric, pictures and text, play video files.
Stylish & modern design: very thin and compact, vivid color & nice finish
Long playback time
FM recording and Datacast features
Various games
Dictionary and subway
Bluetooth
Future firmware upgrades for improving functionality
Cons
Comparing to Apple’s iPod Touch, P3 is much smaller than iPod Touch. However, P3 itself seems to be a little longer compared to its width.
Conclusion
P3 is a good looking, smart and reliable product, and provides a lot of fun including various games. Samsung’s own technology DNSe 3.0 delivered rich sound. I enjoyed watching videos and Flash contents, listening to FM radio and TTS contents from Datacast and Text, reading the Datacast and Text contents, etc. P3 should be the improved next generation of P2 for sure.
Samsung is ready to launch a new stylish MP3 player called YP-P3. The nickname of the YP-P3 player is “Haptic”. Haptic means “touching” in Greek. The concept of Haptic is that by touching the player, users can feel the vibration of the player. Actually, it did. I was quite surprised when I touched the LCD screen. I felt a little vibration and thought there was a gap between the top and bottom cases. The vibration feature must be an attraction point. As you can see by the name of the player, P3 is the next generation of P2. The design of P3 is pretty much similar to P2 but it is much more stylish and user friendly. Some features of P3 that I like are the built-in speaker and TTS (Text to Speech) feature in the Text and Datacast menu.
Now, let’s explore P3.
Package
The gift package is a well designed tiny box as for the previous products. It includes the YP-P3 player, USB data cable, earphones, Installation CD and a warrantee card.
Appearance and Design
P3 is slim and thin. The dimension is 102 x 52 x 9.9mm and 96 grams. The metal body, tempered glass and the hairline on the back make P3 dandy and valuable. The 3” TFT 16:9 wide QVGA touch screen is large enough to navigate all necessary information, and to display vivid images through 16M colors.
The top side is composed of the Power/Hold, Volume up, Volume down buttons, and built-in speaker. The speaker is very useful when using the player without earphones. There is no need to purchase additional speakers.
The bottom side has the Reset/Microphone hole, 24-pin port for USB data transfer and charging, and 3.5 pie earphone connection port. There is no button on the left and right sides.
Just below the touch screen LCD on the front panel, there is so called ‘mini-player touch area’ which displays the mini-player slide horizontally.
Attractive Main Menu
The desktop is composed of the main menu screens. The icons on the main menu are colorful, clean and well organized. The user interface is more intelligent and friendly than previous models.
The memo function works just like Post-It. Some important information like meeting schedules can be written in the Memo page. The brightness of the LCD can be also adjusted directly by touching the light bulb.
To change the screen, the ‘EmoTure’ feature does it all. EmoTure is a shortened word for emotional gesture. EmoTure offers various ways to communicate with the touch screen by tapping, flicking and dragging.
DNSe 3.0 Support
DNSe 3.0 stands for Digital Natural Sound Engine that Samsung developed recently. DNSe 3.0 tried to recover the original sound quality as much as possible. During the encoding process to make MP3 files from an audio CD, the sound quality is reduced. In order to restore the missing sound to as much as the original sound quality, Samsung developed DNSe 3.0 and adapted to the current MP3 players.
VibeWoofer Effect
One of the newest features is VibeWoofer. Some cellular phones have similar feature to VibeWoofer but P3 would be the first MP3 player implementing the VibeWoofer feature. Once it is enabled, P3 vibrates while music is being played, or when operating buttons.
Music Menu
Music can be found in the File Browser and Music menus. The lyric of music can be displayed on the screen once the lyric is added to the music file using the EmoDio software provided by Samsung.
Picture Menu
Just like recent ordinary MP3 players, P3 supports photo files in JPEG, PNG and BMP format. Since the LCD provides 16M colors, the images are much vivid and clear.
Video Support
The video CODECs that P3 can support are MPEG4 (AVI, SVI), H.264 (M4V), and WMV9 (WMV). I have tried some AVI and WMV files, but P3 could not play them. Those files must have unsupported CODECs. In such case, I used Samsung’s music management software called “EmoDio”. Using EmoDio, video files were automatically converted to SVI format which is the Samsung’s video file format to play from P3.
TTS and Text/Datacast Support
Text and Datacast are very useful features. Both of them display text information. Using the EmoDio software, the Datacast feature automatically receives interesting and recent news from the WEB, Blog, NEWS, and UCC sites without having visited the sites. I could enjoy reading the updated information through P3 instead of reading the actual newspapers. The texts can be displayed vertically or horizontally. Since multitasking is provided by P3, I could listen to the music while reading the text. In addition to reading the texts, the EmoDio provides TTS which stands for Text to Speech. Enabling TTS on, the text files or DataCast files are converted into voice files and transferred to P3. This means I could listen to the voice files instead of reading texts.
Flash and Subway Support
The Flash player supports SWF files. Metronome is a sample included in P3. The manual mentioned that some SWF files are not supported. But as far as I tested, P3 could successfully play all the SWF files I had. The worldwide subway maps should be helpful when taking subways.
FM Radio, Calculator, Dictionary and Voce Recording
FM radio is a must feature for MP3 players. The auto scanning and preset modes are convenient to get favorite channels. While listening to FM radio, the FM channel can be recorded as well. Other than FM radio,
Voice recording is another must feature. When having a conversation or lecture, the voice recording feature will provide us to memorize the past.
P3 provides a calculator. When calculating numbers, this is a useful one.
The dictionary provided in P3 is English-English, English-Korean and Korean-English. The dictionary feature might be helpful for learning English and Korean
Built-In Speaker
The 0.8Watt speaker is very useful. Although the speaker supports only mono sound, the sound quality was good and it provided me a freedom from bothersome wires.
Bluetooth 2.1
The Bluetooth 2.1 feature now supports various functions. P3 works great with the Bluetooth.
File Transfer: Using the Bluetooth feature, we can send photos, phone book, and music files without wires.
Wireless Music: We can listen to the music on Bluetooth supported audio systems like car stereo system, headphones or home theater systems.
Bluetooth Games: P3 can play wireless games with other P3s.
Hands Free: Without touching the mobile phones, P3 can receive and make calls.
The manual specified some mobile phones that work with P3. They are:
Samsung: SPH-C3250, SPH-W2700, SPH-V7400, SPH-V6900, SCh-W270, SPH-B5600, SPH-B3200, SGH-X828, SGH-1718, SGH-E908, SGH-U608
LG: LG-KH1000, LG-KV2400, LG-KG90, LG-KG77
SKY: IM-U130
NOKIA: N72
PHILIPS: S900
MOTOROLA: Z3
Games
There are several games that P3 provides. They are Bubble Bang, Bubble Smile, World Car Puzzle, Alggagi, Omok2, PowPow, Sudoku Champ. A number of games are included as new MP3 models are developed.
Leather Pouch (Optional)
The leather pouch above is an optional product. It is not included in the package and it has not been launched on the market yet. The pouch is quite solid and has a magnetic button. It should protect P3 from damage.
Menu Tree
Above is the screen shot of the menu structure from the manual. The menu tree simply shows the structure of P3.
Specification
Audio Format:
MPEG1/2/2.5 Layer 3 (8kbps~320kbps, 22KHz~48KHz)
WMA (8kbps~320kbps, 8KHz~48KHz)
OGG (Q0~Q10)
FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec)
AAC-LC (16kbps~256kbps, 8kHz~48kHz)
AAC-Plus (16kbps~256kbps, 16kHz~44.1kHz)
Enhanced-AAC-Plus (16kbps~56kbps, 32kHz~44.1kHz)
Video Format:
AVI/SVI: MPEG-4 Video (480x272) Simple Profile,
MP3 Audio ( 44.1KHz, 128kbps),
WMV: WMV9 Video (480x272, Max bitrate 860kbps)
MP4: H.264/AVC Video (480x272) Baseline Profile @ Level 1.3, AAC/AAC+ Audio
Image Format:
JPG (Baseline, Progressive), BMP (Max 32bit), PNG, GIF(89a/87a)
Flash: SWF (Flash Player 8.0 or lover, ActionScript 2.0 or lower)
Number of Files: Max. 10,000 (including 4,000 music files)
Number of Folders: Max. 10,000 (including files)
Memory: 4GB/8GB/16GB/32GB
Color: Black/Silver
Dimension (WxDxH): 52.7mm x 102mm x 9.9mm
Weight: 96gram
Case: Tempered Glass, Plastic, Aluminum
LCD: 3” TFT LCD QVGA
Earphone: 20mW/Ch. (at 16 ohm)
Frequency Range: 20Hz~20KHz
Noise to Ratio: 89dB with 20kHz LPF (based on 1kHz 0dB)
Playback Time: Audio: Max. 30Hrs (MP3 at 128kbps, volume at 15, LCD off, and normal sound effect)
Video: Max. 5Hrs (brightness at 5, volume at 15, and normal sound effect)
FM Frequency: 87.5~108.0MHz
FM T.H.D.: 0.8%
FM Signal to Noise Ratio: 45dB
FM Useable Sensitivity: 5dBu
Speaker Power Output: 0.8W Mono
Speaker Impedance: 8 ohm
Speaker Frequency Range: 400Hz~20kHz
Battery Type: 610mAh / DC 3.7V
Pros
Improved User Interface
VibWoofer: A little vibration makes P3 feel alive
Built-in Speaker
Large 3”: TFT LCD
Wonderful DNSe 3.0 sound quality
Advanced Multimedia Technology: Allow users to listen to music and FM radio, view the music lyric, pictures and text, play video files.
Stylish & modern design: very thin and compact, vivid color & nice finish
Long playback time
FM recording and Datacast features
Various games
Dictionary and subway
Bluetooth
Future firmware upgrades for improving functionality
Cons
Comparing to Apple’s iPod Touch, P3 is much smaller than iPod Touch. However, P3 itself seems to be a little longer compared to its width.
Conclusion
P3 is a good looking, smart and reliable product, and provides a lot of fun including various games. Samsung’s own technology DNSe 3.0 delivered rich sound. I enjoyed watching videos and Flash contents, listening to FM radio and TTS contents from Datacast and Text, reading the Datacast and Text contents, etc. P3 should be the improved next generation of P2 for sure.
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