Samsung YP-T10

In a world of sleek and sexy travel companions (and I don’t mean the two-legged variety; I’m talking about personal media devices!), the Samsung YP-T10 is one of the sleekest I’ve seen. But just because it looks so good, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it is good. So naturally I decided to put it to test.

Form Factor
The YP-T10 is super-slim; I actually carried it around in my wallet to prove the point. It has a superb 2-inch TFT LCD display with a 240 x 320 pixel resolution. The touch-sensitive navigation system is not new to Samsung's range of players; it’s similar to the YP-S5 or the much older YP-K5. The T10 has a 5-way navigation key, a return key, and a sub-menu key to access the various features.

There's a 3.5mm earphone socket at the bottom and Samsung’s proprietary USB port right alongside. The power and hold switch is on the side. Needless to say, the entire form factor is designed to be easy to use and transport. It weighs in at just around 1.5 ounces.

Features and Performance
Where do I begin? This player looks like it would float on water, seeing how light it looks and feels. But it's loaded with features: Bluetooth, a .TXT viewer, voice recording, and even an address book. There's just one peeve I have (although it could be a glitch with this piece): scrolling through the main menu – only the main menu, mind you – seemed very sluggish.

Media
The audio is, in a word, splendid. It’s loud and clear, and the earphones are comfy to use. So you don't need to spend money on an additional set. The music player allows you to create playlists on the device itself. If you don’t want to use Samsung’s bundled media manager software to transfer your files to the player, you can simply copy-paste them. No biggie.

Other features include some cool visualizations, sound effects for different environments like ‘Street Mode’. Apart from Samsung’s DNSe EQ presets and a customizable EQ, there’s also a Master EQ in the settings menu. The PC Media Studio software converts videos to suit the player and offers some pretty advanced settings that let you adjust the bitrate. Playback is good, though the 2-inch screen doesn’t really make the experience memorable.

FM radio reception is better than average. Auto preset took all of three seconds to find the stations while I was traveling in a train. It missed two channels, but you can manually tune those in and save them as presets. The YP-T10 also has a recorder for the radio that works fine. You also get a voice recorder for memos.