I bought a Samsung YPZ5 a few years back after having broken my previous MP3 and seeing this one discounted in an Argos sale booklet. It was a few years back and I’ve lost the receipt so I can’t remember exactly, but it was around £30 and it got great reviews. So, there I was with no MP3 to my name, looking at a £30 MP3 that had pretty good ratings and I thought to myself – why not?
Features
The Samsung YPZ5 is an MP3 player that was part of Samsung’s new line of music playing devices, released a few years ago. Its compatible not just MP3 files types, but also OGG’s, WMA’s, WMA-DRM’s and it is also able to hold and view JPEG’s which are pictures. It may be very small and compact with a height, width & depth of 42.2 x 89.8 x 11.4 and weighting in just over 2 ounces – but it has 1.8inch LCD colour screen, making it easy to navigate your way around the player as the menus and graphics are clear and of good quality. It has a cursor driven touchpad which makes it easy to use, gives you complete control and also adds to the modern and trendy look & feel of the player. The sleep-countdown timer switches the player off when it’s not been in use for a certain amount of time, saving its battery life meaning that you can listen to the music you love for longer. With many other great aspects such as Street mode, adjustable sound systems and 35hour playback, the Samsung YPZ5 is not short of features and was a well-equipped edition to the Samsung music playing device range.
Packaging
The box that the player came in was quite a fancy box, and was some of the nicest and trendiest packaging I had ever seen and encountered. It had a piece of card that had an image of the player along with the Samsung logo on it that you had to slide off to reveal the actual box that held the player. When I opened the actual box, inside was the Samsung YPZ5 player along with a USB cable, a software disc and earphones accompanied with ear pads. At first I wondered where the mains charger was, and thought that I had got a faulty player with missing pieces, but I soon realised that it charged via USB, and therefore all I need a mains charger. As well as this, there was an instruction manual and a health and safety booklet.
Looks & Design
The Samsung YPZ5 is available in 3 colours; black, silver and pink (mine is pink). It is a very small player as I said before and is very thin, which means that it will easily fit snugly into your pocket so you can take it anywhere and listen to it on the go. The 1.8 LCD colour screen is great, as it is not only bright but the graphics and text are clear to see and read, making this player not just suitable for the younger generation, but also for the older generation who may not have the best eyesight. Underneath this screen, there is a silver square. This square is made up of 4 navigation buttons, the play/on/off button, the skip to the next track button, the go back to the previous track button and the back/escape button. Inside this silver square of buttons is the cursor track pad, this track pad has a design on it with little images to help you learn how to use it properly.
In the top of the player are the hold/player lock button and the headphone socket, and on the side of it is the volume control. The volume control on the YPZ5 isn’t like your normal MP3 volume control, instead of two buttons; it is one long, elongated buttons with a plus on the top side and a minus on the bottom side. You press the plus or minus to change accordingly to alter the volume to be higher or lower. On the bottom of the player is the USB port, which is also used as a charging port as this player charges via USB rather than a mains charger. This MP3 player has been designed so well, as it has all of the buttons that you need to navigate it, yet it doesn’t look cluttered or overcrowded and also manages to carry out that trendy and modern look. The Samsung YPZ5 is a stylish and popular music playing device, and it’s fair to say that its look and design certainly reflect this.
Using the player & How the Player works
This MP3 player is very easy to use once you get the hang of it. To switch it on, you press and hold the play/on/off button. It starts up quite quickly which I was very surprised at, as it was quicker at starting up than some of my previous MP3 players that were of a better quality, higher price and higher rating than this one. The first screen that you will see once the player is on is the Main Menu. On this menu, there are 6 options; Music, Pictures, Playlists, Shuffle All, Settings and Now playing. On the touchpad, there is an up arrow towards the top of it, a down towards the bottom of it, a square in the centre and a dot towards the left & right of it. These little detailings show you where about you need to press on the touchpad to go up, down, left and right on the menu of the player. To go up, down, left or right, you simply tap the touchpad lightly in the corresponding place on the touchpad. It doesn’t require a hard tap, just a light one as the touchpad is very sensitive. To actually select something on the menu, instead of tapping the centre of the touchpad, you actually have to press it. It took me quite a while to get the positioning and the pressure of this pressing right and it does take a while to get the hang of it, but you soon get to grips with it. To go back to the previous menu or screen, you press the escape button which is the top button of the button square surrounding the touchpad. If you select Music on the main menu, then you are taken to another menu that lets you select how you want your songs to be categorised for playing, you can choose to have your sings listed in terms of Artist, Albums, Genres, Composers, Playlists or you can choose the Shuffle, All songs or Browse files option. Whichever one you select, will then take you to the song listing of your choice and you can then listen to the songs you would like to listen to. The other options that are on the Main Menu are pretty self-explanatory really; Selecting pictures will take you to your picture library, Playlists will take you to your playlists, Shuffle All will literally shuffle every song, Settings will take you to settings and Now playing will take you to the Now Playing screen.
When you are on the now playing screen, you can skip to the next track or go back to the previous track by pressing the skip track buttons which are the left and right buttons in the button square. To turn the volume up, you just press the plus or minus on the volume button which is located on the side of the player, and to lock the player you simply slide the hold/player lock button that is on the top of the player. This lock function comes in really handy when you are listening to your player on the go or if you have it in a jean pocket, as it means that it won’t skip a track, decrease the volume or switch off by itself. The YPZ5 on the whole is very easy and simple to use, the touchpad is a bit tricky to work at first but once you use it for a while you soon learn how to use it properly.
Storage
The YPZ5 has 3 different storage capacities available; 1GB, 2GB and 4GB. The version that I bought was 1GB, and I only realised this when I managed to fill it to the brim with songs. When I bought this player, it was on offer as part of a clearance sale, and was therefore a clearance product. I immediately saw the price and saw the good reviews and my mind was pretty much made up, but I didn’t read the product detail or the specifications. In this specification it clearly stated that this device was a 1GB version only, but I didn’t see this and was very shocked when I filled my device so quickly - I had only put about 100 songs on it and it was already full! I did some research and apparently a 1GB MP3 player should hold between 200 and 250 songs, which made me even more confused as to why I could only fit 100 on mine. I tried going through and deleting some of the sample pictures that were on the device, downloading different versions of the songs, but still it kept refusing to add my songs as there wasn’t sufficient storage space. I soon came to the conclusion that it must’ve been the fact that the songs I had downloaded were of quite a large file size, and must've taken up more space than the average song. On this note, I was very disappointed with the YPZ5, as for me this is only a small fraction of the amount of songs I would like on my music playing device, but in all fairness it is my own fault as I did not read the fine print.
Sound Quality
The sound quality of this player is very good. The volume control has a very wide span of volume levels, making this player cater for everyone from those quiet riders to those noisy rockers. The bass is good, not the best I have ever encountered in an MP3 player, but it is enough to still make listening enjoyable. This combined with the earphones provided with the player; make the sound quality of this player very good indeed. For what was a clearance item at £30, I had assumed that the sound quality would be mediocre or below average, but that isn’t the case and in actual fact, the sound quality is great.
Shuffle
The shuffle for me is by far the best feature of this player. I have had a lot of MP3 players in my time, and I always listen to my players on shuffle, I never select my tracks, it always has to be on shuffle.
But I’ve found with other MP3’s that I have had, that their shuffle isn’t really a proper shuffle, it’s more of a shuffled selection of about 30 tracks, that then repeats and repeats and repeats – this is not a proper shuffle. However, the YPZ5 has an amazing shuffle. There are two methods of shuffle on this player; there is the Shuffle All option and the Shuffle option. When you select the Shuffle option from the main menu of the YPZ5, it then asks you if you want to shuffle the artists, the songs, the genres etc. This alone I think is fantastic as with other players, I haven’t even been given this option; it just shuffles it how it wants to shuffle it. I usually select All Tracks when this second menu pops up, and once I select this, a new screen appears, but on this screen, there is a list of all of the songs on the device in a jumbled order. This for me was a proper shuffle. I had never had an MP3 that had had a shuffle function like this one, and this was the shuffle version that I had always longed for! The Shuffle All option does exactly the same as this, it shuffles all of the tracks and it’s basically a quicker way to get to this jumbled song order. The shuffle on this player is absolutely fantastic, the fact that it gives a complete order of the mixed up songs ensures me that I won’t have that frustrating shuffle cycle that I had to endure with other players, but it’s also a really pleasant surprise when it’s the turn of a song that I really love to play.
Price
As I mentioned before, when I bought this item it was at a discounted price of £30 as part of a clearance sale. I’m not quite sure what the original price was, but I’m pretty sure it was double the price if not a bit more. The only aspect that disappointed me about this player was the storage space, and then fact that I could only fit 100 songs on it. I absolutely love my music and I am used to MP3 players with really big storage space so that I can listen to all of my favourite songs, so even though this player has so many great features, I’m afraid that those positive features don’t outweigh the negative one. As a result of that, I have to say that for the storage supplied, I don’t think that this player is a value for money player and I think that the price should be a lot less for the small amount of songs that can be stored on it.
Summary
Overall I think that the Samsung YPZ5 is a great MP3 player. The design is fantastic and really reinforces the trendy and modern vibe that it gives off. It’s very easy to use, with clear menus and headings and the sound quality is great. The Shuffle is by far the best feature of this device, I have never come across a shuffle like it, and I absolutely love it! It lets me listen to all of my songs, not just a repetitive cycle of a few selected songs, and when a song I love but haven’t heard in a while plays, I get a pleasant surprise. The only downside of this player is the storage capacity; 1GB is nowhere near enough for me. Yes, I do listen to a lot of music, but I feel that even for a non-music-lover, that this still would not be enough to hold all of their songs. Apart from this storage issue, the Samsung YPZ5 is a great little player, and for £30 I think it was an absolute bargain – I recommend a version with a bigger storage capacity to anyone.
Its got the Quality, but not the Quanitity 
