Forget the Shuffle, Forget the MuVo, It's all about Yepp!! (Samsung YP-T7Z 1 GB)

Member Name: cheesycal

Product:	Samsung YP-T7Z 1 GB
Date:	07/09/05 (1127 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Has all the features you'd ever want in a MP3 player!

Disadvantages: unfortunately only one thing isnt there...playlist support.

In the world of flash based players, the hot shots are the iPod Shuffle and the Creative muvo. And somewhere way down the list are the other companies trying to cash in with their cheap alternatives. Apple and Creative, it seems, have cornered the market with their respective products. Along comes Samsung, a formidable name in the electronics business, and tries to nudge into the clique.

If the market was fair and just, Samsung should be dominating with their YP-T7 Series. They have produced a far superior mp3 player in all aspects for around the same price and yet people don't know about this wonderful product! Sometimes when I think about this, a tiny little tear droplet forms in the corners of my eye...

The YP-T7 series is a group of flash memory mp3 players of 256mb, 512mb or 1Gb capacity. The "YP" stands for Yepp - Samsung's brand name for the MP3 player division. "T7" is just a code that follows on from T5 and such.

The one that I have is the T7Z, the silver 1Gb one. The other ones come in different colours: the 512mb comes in blue; 256mb comes in red, green or black. I had been covetting this product since it was announced and was given it by my friends as a birthday present! :D

I digress. here's the review

Design&Quality

The YP-T7Z, at first glance, looks like a miniture Hard-disk player to the likes of Apple iPod 20Gb or Creative Zen. As you can see from the picture above, it has a screen and below that is the navigational joystick. Along the right side are the play/pause, Record, hold and A-B buttons. on the bottom, there are sockets for the line-in cable and the mini-USB. The player has a metallic case and so has a feel of class (compared to the plasticky shuffle and muvo).

The screen measures 1.2" diagonally and is capable of displaying 65,000 colours. Although it's small, it's bigger than those of the rivals and is more than sufficient for the excellent user interface.

The user interface is very easy to navigate through much like the windows explorer interface on your computer. the Joystick is very responsive and even after 6 months performs perfectly. The interface is very colourful and well animated, very much like those found in samsung's phones!

There is a little loop at the top of the player that comes out as in the picture above. You can attach your lanyard so that you can wear the T7 proudly around your neck. The T7 only measures 2.4" by 1.5" with a depth of half an inch and weighs only 1.2 ounces. This is 0.2 ounces heavier than the shuffle but still very very light. If you take into account the features, it's nothing short of amazing!


Features&Performance:

There are features abound in this minute player, which you would expect from a HDD player. Firstly it plays all the common supported audio formats: mp3, wma and ogg vorbis. The .ogg playability is a great advantage. .ogg is the best format available in terms of quality for size but is not supported in many mp3 players. In addition to these, it also supports .asf which is an added bonus.

The radio is another stunning feature in this player and lets you preset 20 different frequencies. Once again, the radio benefits from the increadibly user-friendly interface and to access the many features of the radio is straightforward. You may autoscan, manually scan, preset, select the region (example, USA, Japan, Korea etc) and record off the radio! You can put a timer on so you can record your favourite radio programme without fussing about it, and there's even an option to set the sensitivity of the autoscan.

In addition to the radio, you can use T7 as a dictaphone using the built in mic. With 1GB of space, you can record tons of lectures and voice memos which are stored in a separate folder.

You can also record and encode music directly from tapes or CD players via the line-in port and there's an Autosync option that will start and stop the recording at the start and end of the track! All recordings (radio, voice or direct line-in) can be encoded directly into MP3 at whichever bitrate you choose (from 32Kbps to 192Kbps)

The other features are the image viewing and text viewing. Although the screen is very small, portrait images can be seen very clearly and accurately. You may have problems with details in landscape images given the limited number of pixels but it is more than enough as a preview! You can view the pictures while you are listening to the music and same with text. To be honest, I haven't used the text viewing often as the screen is too small to fit in many words at a time. But I suppose it would be useful for small notes..although I tend to use the voice recording for that. On the other hand, I have used the image viewing capabilities very frequently.

Sound quality is incredible given the size of the little thing. It is on par with the Shuffle and MuVo for sound quality but what helps the T7 nudge slightly ahead is the various options for enhancing the sound. In neither of the competitors will you get WOW sound, SRS (for surround sound) or TruBass (bass amplifier). In the T7, you also have a Bass Booster if the three offered above aren't enough. You have the typical Classical, Pop, Rock and Jazz equaliser options on top of that and even a user defined 7-band EQ! In addition, there's an Auto EQ function which will vary the EQ according to the music genre as specified in the ID3 Tag! In all, these features brighten up the sound of the samsung T7 and lifts it above and beyond the iPod Shuffle and Creative MuVo.

The only thing that is lacking is playlist support. You can't download playlists (say from windows media player) and expect it to run on the T7. However, there is a "favourites" option where you select the tracks you want and it creates a playlist for you. I'm not sure if MuVo has playlist support, but Shuffle definitely doesn't..

You get with this mp3 player the following items:

1. carry case - made of rubber, kinda translucent, works well in protecting the mp3 player. has a belt clip on the back. I think that the earlier versions had a plastic holder rather than a case..

2. Line-in cable - for direct encoding (see above)

3. Necklace earphones - very useful. annoying if you don't want to wear it around your neck. the earphones are quite uncomfortable though and need a bit of getting used to. You should get better earphones anyway. When I do not need it on my neck, I use Sennheiser earphones.

4. Manual and Charger and USB cable

5. CD with a media playing and converting software and image editing software.

So you get all that you need for this!

Transferring files from the computer to T7 and vice versa is every easy: just a case of drag and drop and T7 organises the files much in the same way as windows does. The USB interface is 2.0 meaning that you can transfer files very rapidly. If your computer doesn't support USB 2.0, don't worry because T7 also works on USB 1.0 but it will be a lot slower. Using the USB 2.0, I can transfer files at over 8.0 MB per second which means that I can transfer a whole album in about 5 seconds! This is a lot faster than my friend's iPod Shuffle and MuVo.

The Battery life is unfortunately below average for flash players. While the MuVo boasts around 20 hours playback, I'm averaging around 13. My friend's Shuffle has approximately the same as the T7. 13 hours is still pretty good and charging up the player is very straightforward. Just plug in the charger..and whenever you link the USB, the player charges automatically.

The little problems that the T7 has could be resolved by a simple firmware update and this is supported in T7. Firmware update is very easy, you just drag and drop the new firmware file (downloaded from the samsung website) and switch on the player. As yet, samsung have not brought out the firmware to support playlists, but I hope that they will soon!

SOme of the other features to mention are the Timer and Sleep options.

To sum up, there are so many features on this that it's very easy to forget that the Samsung T7 is a flash based player. Instead, it sometimes feels like very miniature hard disk player.

The MuVo or the iPod shuffle do not come anywhere near this product. Forget the other stuff, this is the one to get!

Summary: A flash memory player that has all the features of a hard disk player..and more!

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