Samsung YP-35H 128 MB MP3 Player

With over 15 hours of playback capability along with 128 built-in flash memory and voice-operated recording, you are assured of hours of pleasurable listening.

1 Light weight and easy to use
First of all, allow me to use the soapbox - It gets to me that some people expect a product to function like all other products on the market put together! One buy a product for the functionality ones needs it for. Reading the marketing material is fine but then every company's product is the best in the world; download the user manual from the product web site, read the product's specifications and instructions, then purchase it if it matches your requirements!

Second - To the reviewer Electronics Fan from Boston MA. This is a Samsung not a Rio digital audio player. I could just see you going to back to a car dealer complaining that you cannot start your Ford with your spouse's GM key. So some advice, use the software that comes with the unit.

Finally, the Samsung YP-35H - I purchased this unit for my wife, who jogs and travels on a regular basis, because of its size, weight and ease of use. The unit holds 2 to 4 CDs depending on the bit-rate used. I copied my wife's CDs onto the PC in 64 and 96 Kbps format to allow her to download the maximum possible onto the YP-35H if quantity is more important than quality. The sound in either format is as good as any portable CD player I have owned. The controls are easy to use and intuitive; nothing fancy but it has the functionality required. As for the file downloading software goes, you use Windows Explorer to copy the music files from the PC to the YP-35H, again simple yet effective. Unless you copy your music file in a way, as explained below, the only way you can find a specific piece of music is to use the Playmode Intro feature or skip from one song to the next. So the unit's main purpose is download music and enjoy listening to it. To copy file in proper sequence (such as chapters of a book) don't copy the files from the PC to the YP-35H but copy the directory the files are in; the only drawback is that if you are copying music and want to listen in shuffle mode you will only hear one directory/album at a time. A way around this is to copy the music into a directory that can be called "Favourites". As is with virtually all portable units, the headphones/earphones are usually the weakest part of the unit. The earphones that came with this unit are relatively comfortable but if you're running they tend to fall out. So be prepared to buy a pair that fit you well and are appropriate for your use. Battery lifespan is very good. One wish would be to have a way to activate the backlight without activating anything else at the same time. So 4 stars for what it will be used for.

2 Worst software ever
I would never buy a Samsung product. The RIO software is a horrible joke except nobody is laughing.

3 Not for books on tape
I listen to a lot of books on tape and with the rise of books on CD I thought I'd enter the modern era by getting an MP3 player. I picked the YP-35H. Big mistake. It turns out that when you drag and drop files on to the device, there is no guarantee that the track/files will go on in the order you expect. For music, it probably isn't that big a deal. For books, it's unacceptable.

4 Good MP3 Player
This is the first MP3 player I've owned, and I must say that I really like it. I just wish I'd gotten rid of my bulky CD player sooner. Not having used an MP3 player before, I don't have much to compare this to, but I've found the features more than adequate for me, and I think the sound quality (at least for MP3s at 128 kbps) is just fine. I'm no audiophile, so I'm probably less concerned with the quality than I might otherwise be anyway. My main goal was to replace my CD player so that I could listen to music while jogging, and this product does that nicely. Although my "cons" list is longer than my "pros" list, I still give this a four out of five.

Pros:

-Good range of EQ options
-Very small (about the size of a pager)
-Backlit display
-Easy to move files from the computer to the player
-Doubles as a voice recorder (although I haven't tried this feature yet)
-Runs on one AAA battery

Cons:

-Packaged headphones (bud type--they consistently fell out of my ears while jogging)
-Buttons are very small and sometimes difficult to manipulate
-Although it hasn't happened yet, I'm convinced that by snapping the player in and out of the belt clip over and over again, I'm going to break the belt clip (it's necessary to remove the player from the belt clip to both change the batteries and upload files)
-The battery lid also looks like it would break if opened too many times (hasn't actually happened yet)
-The included software for converting CD tracks to MP3 files requires the user to manually input all song/album/artist information. It doesn't appear to be able to retrieve this info from either the CD or the web.
-Fixed memory (not expandable)
-No FM tuner
-Songs are played in alphabetical order, first by artist, then by song title, so custom play orders are not possible, at least not that I've been able to determine (it does have a "random play" function, though)