Touch the screen on the far right and a horizontal volume control bar appears. However, it's so narrow that using it to adjust the volume is a very hit and miss affair not least because half the time when you try to adjust the volume something else happens altogether. The inclusion of the hard volume controls seems to us tacit admission that the touch screen volume control is a bit half baked. When looking at an album track listing with more than eight tracks a similar bar appears to let you scroll up and down, for whatever reason this seems to work far more smoothly than the volume control. Our guess is that in the former mode the screen is just trying give you too many options for something that size.
Skinny
The presence of Samsung's second-generation Digital Natural Sound engine (DNSe2) means that audio playback is once again among the very best we've come across on an MP3 player. A thoughtful touch is the presence of a soft key below the Now Playing screen that allows you to cycle through the players various EQ settings, either pre-set or your own custom job, in real time while the track is playing. The P2 also allows you to set up five playlists from your music library and comes with the Clarity and Street Mode sound-level filters we noted on the T10.
Video playback puts the screen automatically in landscape form. The P2's 3in screen is ideal for 16:9 playback and is just as clear and bright as its sibling's. In video mode, the screen swipe can be set to either take you to the next or previous video, move back or forward by either ten, 30 or 60 seconds, or search at x2, x4 or x8 normal speed.
When you're viewing pictures, the touch screen allows you move from landscape to portrait, to pan around the image if you have zoomed in on it and set up a variable speed slideshow.
At all times, a tap on the screen will bring up a set of basic menu icons allowing you to either move back to the previous screen or bring up a a specific in-activity menu. Much of the time these options are also available via two soft buttons at the bottom of the screen.
COMMENTS
Flash-alkalis? I think not!
Alun Taylor says "the P2 occupies something of a no-man's land between smaller and lighter Flash-bases players with a similar memory capacity".
Well, Alun, I assure you that there are no Flash-bases players on the market today. It is something you have entirely made up. I'm sorry, but you can't extrapolate that Flash-bases players are a larger version of Flash-acids players, just because they have a higher pH. In this case, chemistry and technology do not make salt + water.
OGG support looked good for me too
But 4GB maximum capacity? What a joke.
YP-P2
"Why peepee too"? "Horizontal stroke"!?
Couldn't they ask someone who actually speaks English before choosing names for this thing?
Yepp Girls on page *4*?!
You're never going to get this device noticed on El Reg unless they're on page 1 of every article about it.
Now if you'll excuse me I have to go review my own hardware.
Ogg support
I need to pull you up on Ogg support of the T10 and possibly the P2.
The previous review of the T10 made me want one, but a quick double check on the Samsung site made no mention of Ogg playback. A quick email to Samsung returned this "Unfortunatly [sic] we cannot guarantee the playback of .OGG files on the T10."
This is depressingly vague and doesn't fill me with confidence in buying one, now. Can the author verify that he actually tested for ogg compatibility before stating it as fact in the review? Or, indeed, can anyone else?
BTW comments are closed on the previous review, hence why I'm here.
