Samsung YP-P2 personal media player

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.