Our player came pre-loaded with the cinematic trailer for Dragon Wars, which looked bloody impressive even with the top and bottom 15 per cent of the screen dark so as to accommodate the 16:9 widescreen image. WMV files that we copied across via the supplied Samsung Media Studio 5 software came out looking sharp, crisp and well-defined with excellent colour balance.
We're not too sure about the purple though...
The FM radio works just fine. The lack of RDS is a bit of a pain, but once you've programmed in your own stations in it becomes far less of an issue. The ability to record radio broadcasts is a nice bonus feature and is achieved with only two control actions.
Depending on which part of its website you read, Samsung quotes either 30 or 35 hours of music playback, and four or five hours of video playback per charge. We left ours running for 26 hours repeating the same audio track and it was still going. Performing the same test with video playback drained the battery sometime between 3.5 and four hours. Time to full charge is 2.5 hours, though it seemed to get to about 70 per cent of full charge in just over an hour.
The supplied earphones are nothing to write home about but do the job, being both relatively comfy and tuneful.
So, what about the negative points? All minor stuff. In the menus, the item you have activated is the one without the spot in the circle rather than with - a bit counter-intuitive, especially in those menus with only two options. All bar two of the screen colour schemes are horrid - they must really like pale pink, red and yellow in the Far East, while the "Sammy the Dog" screen images and animations are a little too twee for our taste. And you can't add in a memory card, so you're stuck with your 2, 4 or 8GB.
The player comes in a selection of fairly ghastly colours, so our advice would be stick with the black and go for the 4GB version, thereby saving around £25 against the "equivalent" spec Nano.
Verdict
There really is nothing to fault with this little device but some of the colour schemes. It does everything you could conceivably ask of a small media player, and is both lighter and cheaper than its main competitor.
Samsung YP-T10 4GB MP3 player
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.
