February 4th, 2008Review of Samsung P2 MP3 player
The Samsung P2 is the newest. It’s not the greatest, but it’s pretty good, and it’s damn cheap for what you get. Anyone who wants a touch screen media player should definitely have a good seem at it. The P2 looks smooth and black – a plan you’ll recognize as a Samsung if you’ve seen the K5 or the T10. The 3 inch touch screen dominates. There’s a little light below it which as far as I can tell does nothing but flash during start-up.
You’re paying extra for the touch screen, so you should really be getting your money’s worth. The P2’s is pretty good, but not as precise as Apple’s iTouch. Navigating menus just isn’t since easy, and you make fault. As usual, I should point out that I have quite meaty hands, which means touch screens don’t play nice with me in general.
There are four buttons, two on each side – power/play, volume up, volume down and a hold switch. A main menu shortcut button, even icon on the touch screen menus, is missing. The main screen has three layouts. Some take more practice with the touch screen that others to use properly, but the navigation is intuitive and easy. Normally reviews resolve talk about the music first, because that’s really what you’re buying it for. But the best part of the P2, for me, was the customizability.
You can choose you main screen, but you can also choose the type font (from 3 choices). For music there are 11 equalizer pre-sets as well as a nine-band customizable equalizer, which will please audiophiles. The sound is very good for a player of this size, similar to the Samsung T10. For my money Curative’s and Sony’s top-end players are better but only the picky will be disappointed with the P2.
While files play the touch screen has icons to pause and skip forward and back. Below are the back icon, equalizer shortcut, and menu (for sound effects, equaliser, play modes, play screen, and “horizontal stroke”). Swishing your finger horizontally (“horizontal stroke”) skips to the next track or one before it, depending which way you move your finger. You can customize this to move within a track instead, down to five second intervals.
Above the track info are the battery indicator and time. It’s a nice touch – Samsung has really made use of the extra space a touch screen allows to put in the info you’d want. The quality of the videos is good, you won’t have much to complain about there. Touching the bottom of the screen brings up the control menu. It comes with a small plastic device that props it up to watch movies. Photos showed clearly and bright on the screen, one of the best average players for photo I’ve seen at this price so far. In slideshow mode you can use your finger to move onward or back. This is a bit tricky though, because pressing the display bring awake the menu to. You have to swish your finger to switch photos, which takes a bit of practice to get right.
Also, pressing in different parts of the screen sometimes does different things. In a slideshow, pressing on the bottom bit (concerning as wide as your thumb) only brings up the slideshow menu, and not the settings single (which you have to press in the middle for).
There’s also Bluetooth, file browser, a text viewer, calendar, world clock and pod cast player. The quality of the FM radio was very good, though I found finding channels with the touch screen quite tricky. I often had to move my finger the opposite way to what I thought I should to get it working. File support wasn’t so hot. It only plays the most common audio formats (MP3, WMA and protected WMA). Photos are limited to JPG and video to WMV and WMA. Battery life was very good for a touchscreen – 35 hours of audio, 5 hours of video. I never pushed it the limits to test this though, and You can add songs to the built-in alarm too, so you can wake up to the music of your choice instead of beeps.
It’s a high-quality player, and at $379 for 8GB it’s $100 cheaper than the 8GB iPod Touch. It’s really the same price at the LG Touch Me 4GB model. At that price, and with these features, it’s a no brainier if you want a touchscreen media player. You are paying extra for the touchscreen though, about $50 on the equivalent iPod nano.
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