Perambulation through the menu is problem free and mastered in moments - just tap an arrow to move and hit the centre spot to select. We have long been fans of the iPod's UI, but frankly Samsung now has it beaten like the family mule.
Once playing, the T10 gets better still. Fitted with what Samsung calls its second-generation Digital Natural Sound engine (DNSe2), the sound is simply superb for a portable MP3 player. Of course you get the now obligatory plethora of EQ settings, both pre-set and user-changeable, but these are frankly superfluous.
iPod-beating, no-worries navigation
Leaving the sound in 'normal', we were impressed by the sound quality across a range of musical content, from an album of Bax tone poems through a bit of opera to Springsteen's latest and a live acoustic album.
The player also has a couple of pre-set boost settings entitled 'Street Mode' and 'Clarity'. While the latter is of little use, just giving the bass a kick, the former is pretty handy as it ups the treble and pushes the vocal line forward, which is useful if you are in a Tube or on an aircraft with a constant background drone.
Under the heading 'pointless but fun', you can alter the music playback speed from x0.7 to x1.3 - we struggle to think why anyone would actually want to do this, but hey, a feature is a feature. Slowing down audiobook playback, perhaps? Unfortunately, this function doesn't extend to video.
Video playback is as impressive as audio. Videos play in landscape so you to have hold your player lengthwise to watch, but this really is no hardship and is arguably a better answer to the problem than Apple's idea of making the whole player an odd shape. And, of course, a 2in screen player is never going to be first and foremost a device for watching video.
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.
