Review: Samsung YP-U2

Flash memory is getting cheaper by the day and it is possible to pick up budget MP3 players pretty cheaply. The Samsung YP-U2 is ideal for anyone who doesn’t want to fork out for the something like an iPod nano and has a starting price of just £49 for 512MB.

For that you get MP3, WMA and Ogg Vorbis format support – making this one of the very cheapest Ogg players we’ve seen yet. Track information is displayed on a tiny, four line LCD display and like many flash players of its kind, it charges straight from your USB port and can be double up as standard storage device and/or voice recorder.

The device has eight different buttons which could have made it a real pain to navigate and control. However, one of the YP-U2’s most pleasant surprises is that it is remarkably easy to control. Admittedly these controls can err on the side of fiddly but there’s not really much of a way around that on such a small gadget.

The greatest problem with this player is actually that the ear phones are dreadful – they are pretty uncomfortable, refuse to sit in your ears and don’t sound that great. This latter point is a more serious failing because Ogg Vorbis users especially will find the rest of the sound quality pretty impressive. If you add a better pair of ear phones, you get a much better time of it, but there is still slight lack of bass power which you would get on more expensive rivals.

People who prefer the drag-and-drop method of file transfer will like this player because there is barely any need to bother with the accompanying software unless you need to copy DRM protected content. The rest of the time just dumping the files into it will do just fine.

Ultimately, while the Samsung YP-U2 has it’s drawbacks, there aren’t many better players in it’s price range. It is far cheaper than rivals like the iPod nano and will set you back just £49 for 512MB, £69 for one Gig or £99 for two Gigs. If you do have the money to spend, seriously consider Samsung’s YP-Z5 instead, but otherwise this a great value gadget.