One Shallow Effort

Frankly, I had no intentions on getting this media player at all. I've tried Samsung products so many times, but except for their cell phones (which I love by the way), I have yet to find something that works as good as it looks.

Well I never thought I'd have to get this, but right before yet another recent 12 hour flight I thought I had lost my trusty HP iPaq and was in a complete panic. My plan was should anything ever happen to it to get an iPod touch and just live with its crappy WiFi reception, bite the bullet and convert all of my files to stupid quick time or whatever. That of course is all nice and well if you have plenty of time, but the thing was I had to leave that same day, so I had literally something like 4 hours to find a replacement that plays xVids since all of my movies are transferred to that format for pocket viewing.

I looked through most players at Best Buy and this was the only one with a decent size screen that claimed to play xVids and could be picked up at the store. So I quickly ran there picked it up and started transferring. Here are the things I found:

The P2 is a very cute little thing. It is much smaller than I thought from the pictures. It comes with a built-in, non-replaceable battery, which in my book is a giant negative. The only other things in the box are a USB cable - for file transfer and charging, the installation CD, and a little clip/stand. It charged fairly quickly, though out of the box it already had over half charge. What I usually like to do is drain the battery completely before the first charge, but as I said I had no time for that this time, plus I couldn't do anything with it before plugging it in the computer. Anyway, it was ready to go in about an hour.

The nightmare began when I attempted to transfer my xVid files. At first I was very happy, because this player supports simple drag-and-drop transfers, which is my favorite way to do this. With iPods for instance, it is impossible to do anything without the dreaded iTunes monstrosity.

Well as soon as I dragged the first movie over I got a message on the computer saying: "Though the P2 can be used a storage device, it does not support this type of file and will not be able to play it..." or something like that, basically meaning that it can store it, but it won't play it.

Maybe I should back track a little. Since I knew it could be loaded by dragging and dropping, I did not install the software that came with it. I decided to try just plugging it in first and see what happens. My Vista laptop recognized it and automatically installed whatever was necessary to sync the device with it. Well I thought that maybe if I installed the original software, it might communicate the xVid files in a different way so the player would recognize them.

I popped the CD in, it said it installed successfully, but when I tried to open the software it just blinked a few times and nothing happened. A little icon was added to my system tray and that was all. I looked through the book and clearly there was supposed to be some window with interface and everything. That never showed up. I tried restarting my laptop, even uninstalled and installed again, still nothing. Apparently the software wasn't exactly Vista friendly.

Luckily I still had my old XP laptop so I decided to give it a try. The XP machine couldn't recognize the P2 without first installing drivers from the CD, but once that was done the software installed fine and this time it was ready to go.

Despite the claims on the box, and on BestBuy's website, that the P2 supports all sorts of different formats, the fine print in the booklet explains that it supports them after conversion by the supplied software! Great! Pretty much the only reason for me to choose this player was based on one big nasty lie. If I wanted to encode again anything I could have bought anything really. I was totally out of luck. On top of everything else the Samsung bundled software was extremely slow at encoding, and once it was done it didn't even work. By the way eventually later on after I came back from my trip, I did find a newer version of the software on the Samsung site and it ran fine on Vista, but again the conversion was very slow and just as unsuccessful.

So to summarize here : if you end up with this player and you like it - save yourself the trouble and skip the bundled software it is useless.

Now had it not been for my sticky situation I might have been more forgiving on Samsung, but just for the flat out lying claims they make, I am neither goign to rate the P2 high, nor recommend it to anyone. There would be nothing wrong if they simply said that it supports Windows Media and their proprietary variation of MP4.

Don't go yet though, there is a lot more not to like about this product!

As I already said, this player is very cute and has a gorgeous screen, which unfortunately has a very weird resolution that I've yet to figure out. I can't seem to find an aspect that fits the screen correctly without having to stretch and distort, or crop and letterbox.

The touch screen experience is not the worst, yet very inconsistent. Certain functions require double tapping, while other single and I never knew which one was expected. This is a particular problem when combined with the occasional sluggishness that can seem like the operation required two taps when in fact the system was just slow to respond.

I did appreciate the included stand, as my iPaq (and the new generation iPod touch) don't have one. The stand was very comfortable to use on the airplane seat (regrettably only had a few short WMV videos that I could watch.) As with most things on this model though, this stand showed an equal lack of attention to details. It came attached to a string, which was supposed to attach to the player through a loophole, kind of like the ones on digital cameras and stuff. The stand also doubles as a clip so the P2 won't fall out of your pocket or something. Now the problem was that the loophole on the body of the P2 was so small that no matter how hard I tried I could never get the string to go through it, it was simply too thick for the size of the hole. This type of things show you when designers are really paying attention, or just quickly slapped together the latest trend in a glossy black finish.

Speaking of which, just as with the iPod touch I found myself spending more time cleaning the thing than actually using it. But that's just me.

Now one thing that sends me into a crazy rage is when electronics manufacturers do something so insanely stupid that it feels like it was meant to irritate you. The player comes with no built in speaker, which is fine and all if you are only going to listen to music, but I would appreciate it for watching movies sometimes. Whatever, I'll get over it.

The crazy thing is that even without the speaker, it can make noises during clicks and games and such (again like the 1st generation iPod touch), but cannot make noises for the built in alarm clock.

Now what exactly is the purpose of an alarm clock on a travel device if there is not going to be an alarm?! The booklet clears that up by explaining that you can enjoy the sounds of the built in alarm when connected to external speakers.

I hope everyone can see how ridiculous this is - like I don't have enough alarm clocks at home that I will specifically buy external speakers for the P2, or when I travel I will be carrying those around too! Very frustrating - I am fuming!

Moving on though, I've returned it long ago, there's no reason to stay angry!

A few more minor things I didn't really like:

The games - this is a big deal for me. Though it supports some games, they are very boring, and the controls through the touch screen are not great. I was really hoping that there will be already some fanatical following on the Internet that will spend their life in hacking and developing additional games and software for this thing, but unfortunately there was no such thing. Obviously no one cares to bother with this model.

As far as sound and video quality - they are generally fine. Especially the sound was decidedly better than either my iPaq or both generations of iPod touches that I tried. I never tried the included ear-buds so I have no idea how are they, but with my cheap creative labs ones the sounds was definitely the best I've heard from a portable player. The included sound EQ were mostly gimmicky, I thought the sound was best without any artificial enhancements.

The video looked good, I especially liked the viewing angles. On the OLED screen it was absolutely fine to view the image from any direction without much deteriaration. The aspect ratio, however, ruins the otherwise beautiful screen and makes encoding in the right resolution difficult. Thankfully there is a mode that fills the screen up no matter what the original is, but this usually leads to distortion.

Lastly - the screen orientation depends on the function being used and cannot be changed by the user, which I found annoying, and finally the controls were somewhat weird, with most functions requiring the use of the screen... the blue light on the front is not a touch sensitive button... I don't know why I am saying that, it's probably common sense, but for some reason I kept thinking that was the power button and when I had played with this model at the store before I used to try turning it on by touching that blue light. It doesn't do anything other than glow blue when on, and flash red when powering off.

Oh! Almost forgot. The battery life - it is ok - it lasted about 5 hours of video playback. For audio and anything else it is longer than I care time.

All things considered I can't recommend the Samsung P2 for several reasons:

1. Limited video format support.
2. No replaceable battery.
3. Awkward screen resolution.

These are all the same problems I have with the iPod touch, but the P2 also lack a lot of the features of the iPod while costing not that much less.

To my enormous relief, a friend of mine had found my iPaq so I no longer needed a new media player. If I did though, I would have still returned the Samsung and got an iPod touch - simply because of the WiFi browser and games variety. My iPaq, however, easily trumps either.