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.

Features
The YP-Z5F addresses two key omissions in the YP-Z5--FM radio and voice recording. But while the YP-Z5F goes one up on the iPod nano with voice recording and FM, the rest of its feature set pretty much apes the nano. There's picture viewing, ID3 tag browsing and a rather comprehensive selection of sound equalizer controls.

Oddly for an MP3 player, the YP-Z5F is noteworthy for its picture display capabilities. Thumbnails are neatly laid out in rows of three and pictures can be magnified up to 4x zoom. The YP-Z5F makes good use of the touch square as a multidirectional scroller; it behaves the same way as how a notebook touchpad would.

The LCD screen is one of the most brilliant we have seen for a flash-based MP3 player, so it's a pity Samsung didn't take advantage of it by including video playback support. However, when a picture is applied as a wallpaper, it makes the YP-Z5F's display all the more eye-catching.

To play a track, it's the control pad rather than the play button you should be pressing. While this may seem counter-intuitive, it makes sense since this would free up the play button when you need to pause the music in other parts of the menu.

We love the Samsung YP-Z5F's sound options. There're eight equalizer presets and three 3D simulators that do a decent job of impersonating a club, a stage, or a studio, but no user-defined ones, though. The YP-Z5F also includes an on-the-go playlist creation feature, but unlike the iPod's implementation, the user can update only one song at a time in the playlist. On the iPod, the entire song collection from an artist can be added to the playlist simply by highlighting the artist name. The YP-Z5F also allows for only one on-the-go playlist.

Performance
The YP-Z5F was a big performer in our battery drain test. At 33 hours 59 minutes, it beat most of the MP3 players we reviewed so far this year with the exception of the Panasonic SV-SD770V (79 hours 1 minute).

As the YP-Z5F's FM reception sensitivity can be adjusted, we tried autoscanning on both medium and high settings. Commendably, on medium setting, the YP-Z5F missed only one major station in our test location (within a high-floor office in the central business district). Although it did not miss any major station on high FM sensitivity, the autoscan proved too sensitive; the YP-Z5F logged too many non-existent "stations" in between.

Using 240MB of MP3 files, the YP-Z5F scored 1.04MB per second on our transfer test which is slightly below average and on par with the Creative Zen V Plus (1.21MB per second).

Audio is very good on the YP-Z5F. On Diana Krall's You are Getting to be a Habit with Me, treble and mids were well expressed with no noticeable hiss and plenty of soul. The low end, while having minimal distortion, lacked the solid bass factor we experienced with the iPod nano.