Pricelist of MP3 Player 2008

Good product, got many minor issues
The player works very well with good sound quality and an attractive finish, but that nice finish scratches very easily. VERY durable, I have dropped it multiple times into hard floors from waist height and it still works just fine. The touch pad does take some getting used to, but once you are its a definite iPod killer(though anything that doesn't require iTunes is really). There are dozens of hidden features that I happen to stumble upon by shear chance every month or so. The zooming in on pictures is nice, but the scrolling around doesn't work very well. Feels comfortable in your hand, has a nice bright screen with vivid colors, sleek design, good volume control placement. Wish the battery was anywhere near advertised (lasts maybe 10 hours). A bit pricey for what you get, but I bought it when it was over 0. Reset button is also very effective in case of a glitch and doesn't even reset your clock or settings.

Oh, I love this baby
... especially when it's on special offer for 150$. OK, it's not the newest generation, and it's only 4Gb. But firmware is pretty updated (and easy to get into the critter). With newest firmware, it has almost every feature you'd want, and the interface is smooth. Touch buttons may not be a click-wheel, but they work well enough - never bother me. Sound quality is good, and yes it has a custom EQ and on-the-go playist (if you install the newest firmware).
As one of the few players, this one has dedicated volume buttons - nice if you suddenly just need the level up or down. Battery lasts well (again w. the new firmware) and charges quick. And then this player is a real gem - nice metal feel to it, and it's really well finished. I even like the fact that you can SEE the screws it's assembled with (if you ever want to take it apart - no funny clips and gluing as w certain others.
Overall: Great player that does all the essential extremely well. Buy it.

Junk product
I bought one of these to take back to the UK after my holiday in the USA, arrived back in the UK - powered the machine up - dead as a dodo. Complained to Samsung UK, they were not interested as I had lost the international warranty card. They offered to repair it at my expense or I could send it back to Amazon, this latter option was not viable as I would have had to pay customs duty when the repaired or replacement item arrived in the UK so in effect I have a lightweight door-stop suitable for a doll's house or a door wedge. I will never buy another Samsung product as the quality control and factory checking on my sample was apparently non-existent.

Almost iPod challenger and killer
I needed a replacement after going through 2 third gen ipod 20gb and a fourth gen (non color) 20gb it was time for a new mp3 player. I never liked iPods, all the iPods i got were given to me (some broken and had to have parts replaced) and they weren't really durable and had short battery life (even with battery upgrade). I did a lot of researching, looking at Samsung models and Scandisk models and Creative models. Price range was under 0 dollars. Now I remembered this mp3 player when it first came out and the features on it were good to me. And i looked at other samsung mp3 players and this one had the best set of features that i wanted (i could've wanted a recorder and fm receiver but oh well) and it looked decent.

So I get this in the mail (don't order on friday... it takes forever, i missed my chance to get the 90 day warranty, you have to register in 10 days, well i didn't have internet when it came so i couldn't register and didn't know it was 10 days until the next day)

Windows Media Player locked up the first and second time I tried to sync with it. Later realizing I had all these playlists, I cleared them and copied what I wanted. (it automatically syncs all playlist, i think this is a bit inconvient and i had to delete all of my playlist for that reason)

that was my first only issue. I updated the firmware and that really gave the samsung the features i didn't know i wanted. For example, the new firmware you can create your on EQ on the mp3 player, which is convienient and a hassle, like ipod you can create playlist on the go but you can't highlight albums or artist, but single songs at a time. the playlist don't save (at least i haven't figured out how yet).

a cool feature on it is when you click on a song and it has different artists in that album and you go back to the main menu (say to change EQ or something) well when you go back through you can either go through artists and it'll be highlighted or you can go back to the album. ipods it's the same place. it's convieent when you have the same artist and you want to listen to more of it rather then continue in that perticular album.mixtape.

battery life is good, it's only died on me once and i didn't charge it for 3 days and over used it on a hike so it was understandable it died. i did need to look at the time (didn't have any other means to see time) but all it would say is low battery (no split second main menu) so that kind of sucks.

overall features, compared to a nano, it's good, it's missing stuff like games and calender and what not, i don't think there is an alarm. but it has custom eq and unique go back to song, and has really really good battery life. the headphones that came with it are so much better then ipod nano headphones though i'm buying a pair of dj headphones to hear all the bass.

windows media player sucks, it's very glitchy and really restrictive. i haven't figured out how to delete songs and i mistakenly put two copies of the same album. the file formats is okie, though you have no options on uncompressed files. on top of that for some reason it needs to convert mp3 songs again. i don't know why. m4a doesn't work of course, nor does it convert.

windows media player is probably the bottleneck of this product.

oh you can also run it in UMA (i think that's what it's called) which means u can use it as a flash drive and it shows up as a drive, rather then mp3 player. i haven't copied songs this way, but if i can i'm going to try my mac os on it.

oh it's windows only but if it works on coping songs this way and being able to put it in it's library, we have something that competes ipods.

that's what mp3 player compaines should do. something that works on both mac os and windows.

Product features 4/5
Battery life 10/5 more then 35 hrs on mine
looks 4/5
sound quality 4.5/5
transfer music 2/5

Great, tiny mp3 player.
I have owned only one MP3 player before: an iRiver H10 20GB. It was huge compared to this tiny player. I was truly surprised at the physical size of this Samsung YP-Z5. It's so tiny. Mine is a refurb. I can't stand using Windows Media Player to transfer music to any MP3 player, so I tried to get the player to work in USB mode (also known as UMS mode) as a regular storage device. No luck. My player shipped with version 1.08 of the firmware. I visited Samsung's site and downloaded the 2.47 version of the firmware and installed it. Installation was clunky and I wasn't sure if anything was happening once I chose "upgrade" on the YP-Z5. The upgrade took quite a while (5 minutes at least) and it never turned itself back on after it completed the firmware upgrade. So I turned it on myself, it appeared to lock up at the bootup Samsung logo screen, but after a while it finally loaded. It no longer loads slowly...must have been a one-time thing after the firmware update.

The firmware update allows you to use the YP-Z5 in UMS mode now. You just need to go to Settings--->System Info--->Toggle "UMS only" to "On." Now it will connect as a storage device on your computer...store whatever you want to on it!

So far so good. I just wish it had a microphone to record voice memos and the like. All that aside, it's a great little player. Cheap, small, easy to use. I recommend.