Samsung YP-T10 4GB MP3 player
Another solid shot at the title
Review Let's be honest, any new Flash-based 2, 4 or 8GB media player with a 240 x 320 screen has only one real aim in life: to be better than the equivalent device from that mob who slap a half-eaten Granny Smith on all their kit. So it is with the new Samsung YP-T10.
The specification sheet suggests a pretty beefed-up player. The T10 comes with an FM radio, the latest word in Bluetooth stereo, a voice recorder, a host of screensavers and display options, and a pretty generous range of format support, including WMV, JPEG, MP3, WMA, Ogg and text files.
Samsung's YP-T10: small player, big spec
The T10's styling is more in line with the iPod Nanos of yore than the rather odd shape of the latest generation. Coming in at 96 x 41.5 x 8mm it's taller and narrower, but a touch thicker than the Nano, while at 43g it's also 6.2g lighter. At the bottom is a standard Samsung charger/USB connector and a 3.5mm headphones jack. The retail pack comes without a mains charger so you have to make do with charging the T10 via the bundled USB cable and a computer.
However, the unit can be charged with any Samsung phone charger. This commonality could well be a major selling point for those currently using a Samsung phone.
The only other external switch is the on/off slider on the right. Hold down for on and off, or click up to lock the controls. It's a simple and elegant solution to the whole 'how do I switch the darn thing on and off' conundrum.
Four white arrows glow below the 2in screen along with a white dot in the middle. To the left of the 'up' arrow glows the 'back' icon, to the right the 'current function menu' icon. Tapping any icon gives you an immediate response, so even without any tactile feedback using the controls quickly becomes a real joy.
COMMENTS
T9 or T10
I'm a happy owner of a T9 4GB for over a year now. After reading this article I'd still go for the T9 instead of the new one.
1) The T9's radio has RDS. Really helpful if you travel a lot and want to find your fave station again.
2) Don't take USB mass storage for granted! Samsung didn't implement it in the T9's EU/US firmware, but the Asian ones have it (still English, of course). What about the T10 then?
3) The keys! Why oh why did they go for those horrible touchy thingies instead of keeping the 4-way-pad the T9 has. Looks like the Back/Menu/Mute keys on the side went missing, too! Blindly navigating with the player in your pocket is now impossible (Does come in handy with that rain cloud emptying itself on you)
Thanks a bunch, though it's way above the Granny Smith brand, it doesn't beat its predecessor. I'll keep my T9 :-)
@Gilbert Wham
FLAC is a non-lossy codec which can be used by files in an OGG container. (As opposed to Vorbis, which is a lossy codec which can be used in an OGG container and sounds subjectively better, for any given bitrate, than the MP3 codec). According to the review, OGG containers *are* supported -- but it's ambiguous as to what actual codecs are supported within the OGG container :|
"...standard Samsung charger/USB..."
Surely that should read: "...proprietary Samsung charger / USB....."? If it was standard, it'd be a bog mini-USB as used by world + dog. One of the first things that I look for when buying a new small device these days as it makes life so much simpler.
This isn't helped by the fact that the one thing the Samsung phones I've been exposed to over the last few years have in common was that they all had different and incompatible connectors..........
@AC
Who really cares what the bungled PC software is like?
As long as the device emulates USB mass storage (and pretty much everything does, these days) then as far as the computer is concerned, it's *just* a disk drive.
You can then use your own favourite software -- even whatever the Windows equivalent of `cdparanoia -B`, `for i in *wav; do lame -h $i && rm $i; done`, `mount`, `cp` and `umount` may be -- to transfer your files across.
