Samsung YP-K3

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/digitalmusic/0,39029995,49288774,00.htm

Reviewed 12 April 2007

Reviewed by Nate Lanxon

Samsung's YP-K3 is an incredibly slim and stylish MP3 player, with a touch-sensitive interface and a seamless design. Although not bursting with features, the K3 rivals the iPod nano with its ease of use, attractive design and solid performance.

This 4GB MP3 player is available for an affordable £99, however those with smaller music collections can opt for the 2GB version, which is just £79.

Design
The K3 is lightweight, super slim and a devilishly attractive piece of kit to boot. Complimented by a sophisticated silver border, the metallic black finish and seamless design of this player just oozes class.

One thing that separates the K3 from most competitors is its complete lack of buttons. Samsung has opted for a touch-sensitive interface that's invisible until touched, magically lighting up the controls. It looks seriously cool, but there's no tactile feedback given from the buttons, meaning you can't feel that a button has been pressed.

The touch-sensitive controls come to life as if by magic

In the karmic world of MP3 players, however, no good seems to come without an equal and opposite bad: the K3 picks up fingermarks like there's no tomorrow. This can easily be remedied with a lint-free cloth though, so we're not panicking.

The 46mm (1.8-inch) 160x120-pixel colour OLED screen is nowhere near as sharp as Samsung's more recent YP-T9 model, but performs its job adequately.

Features
Samsung has designed the K3 to be simple, functional and stylish. The menu gives you four options: music, radio, photos and settings. It couldn't be simpler to use. Each menu item is animated but it takes a second for the animation to finish before you can select the option you want. This can be quite frustrating.

The music playback screen is made up mostly of a large graphic. Sadly, there's no support for album art. Artist, album and track name are scrolled at the bottom of the screen, along with the track number and progress information. A context menu is accessible with a push of the menu button, allowing you to choose one of four effective sound effects ('vocal', 'bass boost', '3D sound' or 'concert hall'), choose a different visualisation and select play modes such as shuffle or repeat.

The FM tuner inside the K3 is intuitively implemented. The left and right navigational buttons seek through the frequencies, or you can select an 'autoseek' function. Autoseek found a plethora of mainstream stations but also saved a few stations of white noise for us, too.

If there's one thing we're disappointed with in the K3, it's photo support. Photos are unclear, pixellated and dull.

Performance
Music playback is excellent. Both high and low frequencies are well reproduced: bass is powerful, deep and clear; highs are clean and sharp. Slam by Pendulum is a bass-driven dance track that pounded into our skulls. We noticed a particular strength with certain mid-range frequencies too. This was during certain acoustic tracks, such as Dashboard Confessional's song Hands Down.

Unfortunately there's no album art support, but a visualisation fills the gap

It took an impressive 12 minutes and 30 seconds to transfer our 1.5GB library of test MP3s to the device. Compare this to the 26 minutes it took to transfer the same files to our Creative Zen V Plus and you'll appreciate the K3's speedy transfer rate.

Battery life is estimated at 25 hours. We fully charged our review unit and set it to play and repeat our 1.5GB library of 256Kbps MP3 files as we left the office at 6pm. When we arrived at 9am the following morning, the K3 was off and the battery completely empty. The battery was flattened after 15 hours at most. This is much lower than we'd expected and we believe our review unit's battery wasn't in full health.

Sadly there's no AC adaptor included with the K3 so the player charges over USB when connected to a computer.

The included software -- Samsung Media Manager -- is very simple to use. It's a pleasure to use and handles both music and photos. We also liked the AutoAlbum feature that dynamically builds custom playlists based on preferences you dictate, such as whether or not the song has been played recently or whether it belongs to a certain genre. This is very simple compared to iTunes' smart playlists and works well.

Conclusion
The Samsung YP-K3 is aimed at the style-conscious user who only wants to carry a couple of hundred songs around at any one time. If you're not too bothered about photo or video support, but want a super-stylish, slim and lightweight MP3 player, you'll definitely want to check out the K3. For just around £95, it's a great product.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Kate Macefield