Samsung YP-Z5F (4GB)

By Edvarcl Heng, CNET Asia
Jul 24, 2006

The YP-Z5F has been trumpeted to be Samsung's best weapon against the iPod nano in the flash-based MP3 player market. It pips the nano in battery life, has a positively larger screen and a scratch-resistant chassis. iPod-killing attributes? Possibly. Pair these with a rather classy body and it's good enough to give the nano a run for it money.

Design
When it comes to MP3 players, elegance is a rarely used term. The YP-Z5F seems to epitomize it with a two-tone grey metallic casing. The shiny metallic collar which wraps the player perimeter and the matt glossy square ring around the touchpad all serve to underline the YP-Z5F's lifestyle posturing.

While it's marketed as thin, the YP-Z5F doesn't measure up in the anorexic stakes when staked against the waif-ish iPod nano. It's too solidly built, but that's more of a good thing. No worries of breaking it, for example.

Forget flimsy plastic buttons that feel like giving way the moment you push too hard. Every bit of the YP-Z5F's physical controls oozes durability. The volume rocker is a curved line of metal which offers very good tactile feedback as does the tactile ring around the touchpad. Aesthetically minded users will appreciate the tiny design details such as the knurled texture on the tactile ring and the engraved "positive" and "negative" signs on the volume rocker.

While the YP-Z5F does not boast a Click Wheel, it has a touch scroll, or square, in this case, which works slightly differently from other touch-based interfaces on competing MP3 players. Direct controls such as play and song skipping are handled by the tactile ring, while the touch square is used to navigate up and down, directional-wise. In the case of JPEG viewing, it is useful as a multidirectional scroller when a picture is magnified.

Pressing the center of the touch square will activate the highlighted item. While it sounds good on paper, it can be rather tricky to use. It requires a specific amount of pressure to work the pad. Too hard and the highlight bar will fly through the menu; too soft and the pad won't be able to register your command. It takes a fair bit of getting used to, but like learning to cycle, you need to only master it once.

The UI for the YP-Z5F is very pretty. It's full of clever graphical effects much like Apple's OS X. Select an option and the new menu will fly in from the background and replace the current selection of items. Click back and the previous menu will crowd out the current display from the foreground. The menu itself is served on a translucent blue slate which will not obscure the image selected as the YP-Z5F's wallpaper. We like being given the option to shorten the menu into a smaller info bar at the bottom of the display; this will remove unnecessary clutter on the screen.

UI navigation is organic; pressing the select button will bring the user one level deeper into the menu, while clicking return will serve back the previous menu level. Though the YP-Z5F lacks the contextual sub-menus that the YP-T8 has, holding down the back button will act as a shortcut back to the main menu.

We fault the YP-Z5F for using a proprietary cable. Losing it will entail going back to Samsung for a new one and, if you intend to use it as a mass storage device, the cable will need to tag along as well.

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