Yepp it's good
Written: Jul 12 '02 (Updated Jul 12 '02)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Sound: |
 |
|
| Ease of Use: |
 |
|
| Durability: |
 |
|
| Portability: |
|
|
| Battery Life: |
|
|
|
Pros: Very small and light, ubiquitous memory format, and lots of it.
Cons: Menus hard to navigate, not enough volume.
The Bottom Line: I would recommend this product because it has ample storage space, good battery life, and is reasonably priced.
|
|
|
| seether166's Full Review: Samsung Yepp YP-700 (128 MB) MP3 Player |
Introduction
I was looking to upgrade my MP3 player from my current Creative Nomad II to something with a bigger capacity. As such, I was looking at anything that had 128MB or more…preferably more. I was actually pretty sure I wanted a Diamond Rio800 when I started looking around. However, a number of things turned me off from them, namely poor support, poor reliability, and proprietary batteries and memory. So in the end, I settled on this little Samsung model.
Size does matter!
And in this case, smaller is better. The YP-700 is absolutely tiny, as well as being very light. Mostly this is a good thing, but it’s small size does lead to a few drawbacks. Because it is so small, the buttons are also very small. This makes them difficult to get to and hard to operate. Not impossible, but just not very easy. Also, the screen itself is very tiny. It still displays the song title and other information, it just has to scroll it to do so. To it’s credit however, the LCD screen does scroll well, without blur, and is backlit (of course). I would say these two drawback don’t outweigh the benefit of it’s size however.
Battery
One the things I was too excited about when I bought the player was it does have a non-standard battery. It’s a small rechargeable NiMH that I can’t imagine will be easy to find should replacement become necessary. Probably not too cheap either. However, it is better than the Rio800’s battery that you had to send back to Diamond when it wore out?! I’m not positive how long the battery lasts, I’ve used it for 4 hours straight and the battery level indicator never went down even a notch. I’m thinking it’s good for about 10 hours actually.
A really interesting feature it has though is it has a battery pack too. It’s a small cylinder large enough for 1 AAA battery that attaches to a jack on the player. I thought that was a pretty nice idea from the folks at Samsung. I’ve never used it with the attachment though so I can’t tell you the battery life there.
Lastly, I’ll mention this under battery life for lack of another place, the power button. Or lack thereof really. It has no power button and basically will shutdown with in 2 seconds if you press “Stop” I’m not entirely sure I like that feature, but it does save battery life I suppose.
Menus
The menus are confusing to work with on the player. This is due in part to the small screen not being able to display much at one time. However, if you can navigate through the kludgy menus, there are a variety of setting that you can customize.
Sound Quality/Volume
I can’t say much for sound quality because I am by no means an audiophile. I have trouble telling the quality of any music. I’ll just say that the music this player produces sounds, well, good to me. For what that’s worth. One thing that is a little disappointing is that it doesn’t get exceptionally loud. Loud enough if you aren’t say, biking with it in the wind.
The player has volume settings 1-30, and nicely enough, whenever you turn it on, it defaults to 21. This is nice if you had it set at 30 and you don’t want your eardrums to be destroyed the next time around. Another interesting thing that it does is fade the music in. It never abruptly play the music, but gradually (over the course of less than a second) brings it up to the said volume.
Memory
One of the primary reasons I bought this player was that it uses a ubiquitous memory format. Namely, SmartMedia cards. Keep this in mind when looking for a player. Like the Rio800, this has 128MB built in. However, I just ordered another 128MB for only $47. Whereas with the Rio, and some other players, upgrading the memory is a $100+ endeavor. This does give this player an ultimate capacity of only 256MB (sort of, more on that later), but I feel that is sufficient for me (for now…)
Construction
The player feels very solid too, despite being so light. It has an anodized aluminum case which doesn’t scratch easily and looks good, if flat. My one complaint here however is that faceplate for the screen isn’t recessed. Not only is it not recessed, it’s actually embossed a little bit, making me think it will get scratched pretty easily.
Carrying case
The carrying case Samsung provided it very nice. It consists of an almost velvet finish, and clips securely to your pants. When you attach certain headphones though it is a little difficult to close correctly though. While the case is nice, I definitely preferred the clip built onto the Nomad because it was one less thing to carry, and made the player buttons accessible.
Misc Features
I’ll just throw in a couple of other things that people might want to know.
It is a USB player, so you transfer music that way, and only that way. It has a microphone so you can record your own voice memos and what not. It does also have a remote wire controller that you plug into the player, and then plug your phones into that. That has an LCD on it which displays track number/time. It is nice, but I don’t use it much because generally I just turn the player on and let it play through all its songs.
Software
The player really shines in this regard. I’m used to using Creative’s software that came with my Nomad. That was one horribly written program. In contrast, what Samsung gives you is a godsend. I only installed the “Explorer” they call it which just manages getting files from your computer to the player. But that Explorer does work well.
What I like about it is that when you drag files onto the player, it queues them until you hit “Copy” This is nice because when you’re picking through your MP3 folder you don’t want to wait each time for it to copy. Another nice thing it does is keep a running graph of how much memory is used, and what is remaining.
But undoubtedly the sweetest thing about the software is the MP3 Compress they have in there. My MP3’s are in varied bitrates from 128 on up to 320. But let’s face it, on headphones, you don’t really need 320kbps, right? So with the MP3 Compress software you can select the minimum bitrate you want to listen to and if it needs to, it will convert what is going on to the players to a lower bitrate. It does it on demand so if it doesn’t need to, it will leave it untouched.
I also found it interesting to note that the player’s LCD screen kept you appraised of what it was doing too with “Downloading” “Erasing” etc. However, on the note of “Erasing,” it does take a bit of time to erase the memory. Probably almost 45 seconds to erase the full 128MB internal memory.
Conclusion
I wouldn’t say that this product is everything I wanted in an MP3 player. I wish it had a built in clip mostly. But taken as a whole, I think that this is the best player I could have purchased at the time, and for the money. I enjoy using it and would recommend it to anyone. I can say I’m more than satisfied with the purchase.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 200
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
seether166
|
|
Member: Wes
Location: Syracuse, NY
Reviews written: 69
Trusted by: 12 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.