The folks out at Samsung–yes, actual Samsung!–sent out their new YP-U6 MP3 player for me to review for you, and I have to admit, this sucker is a portable marvel. It’ll fall short of plenty of others in a lot of important ways, but where it counts, this will do nicely.
The Samsung YP-U6 is a four gig MP3 player that offers an onboard FM radio, a fitness mode, a voice recorder, and a built in USB port as well as a rechargeable onboard battery that yields about twenty hours of continuous playback when fully charged.
Now, you can see in the pics below that the YP-U6 is a very small piece of hardware. This is at once its greatest advantage and its greatest flaw. It’s small, which means it’s going to be preeminently portable. Anywhere you go, this thing can easily follow in a shirt pocket, pants pocket, or even hatband. The weight is barely noticeable, and there’s plenty of storage capacity here for your MP3s. And of course, the audio quality here is excellent as well. Plus, with the retractable USB port, you won’t have to worry about finding cables in order to fill your device full of music–simply extend the port, plug it in, and you’re ready to go. The only cables you’ll need to manage are the headphone cables, and you’ll be able to use your favorite headphones because the headphone jack accepts 3.5mm plugs.
But the size of the YP-U6 is also its greatest flaw. Where many MP3 players can also be used for video, with a small screen but still quite visible. The screen on the YP-U6, meanwhile, is so small that video is useless here. And the controls aren’t exactly user-friendly, either–you’ll be using small tabs on the side of the device to get to menus, then that big button on the front to navigate within the menus. Neither user-friendly nor particularly intuitive.
However, if you’re just looking for an MP3 player to play your music, then there’s no doubt that the YP-U6 is just what you’re going to want. What this Samsung MP3 player lacks in versatility, it more than makes up for in portability
