My friend was looking for a new larger capacity mp3 player to replace her current 1.5 gig Rio Nitrus. She’s never been a fan of ipods, and wanted to be able to play a variety of different audio files formats. The Zen Micro which is available at Amazon for $229 caught her attention at first. Then she changed her mind when she noticed the Yh-820 5 gig player with a color screen at the Samsung Store in Manhattan. The design of the YH-820 was really nice, and is very much a woman’s mp3 player in terms of looks – I can’t see a man carrying around one of these as easily. I searched high and low for reviews of the YH-820 but I wasn’t able to find one. I wasn’t able to find many merchants that had it either, it seems that it is a relatively new item. Luckily enough we found a few retailers in New York that had it – better yet, we found one that was selling it for $199. At that price we figured how could we go wrong to try it.
We took a look at it again on BestBuy.com and these specs caught our attention
-Smooth, intuitive GUI (Graphical User Interface) allows easy navigation
-1.6″ LCD with 128 x 96 resolution displays your digital photos in vivid color
-Integrated voice recorder for portable multifunction convenience
-Integrated MP3 encoder allows you to transfer tracks directly from a CD player
-Supports MP3, WMA, Secure WMA, Ogg and JPEG formats
So we bought it and took it home. Setting it up and installing the
software was a breeze. It comes with Napster software but is also
compatible with Windows Media Player 10 with which we used to transfer
music on to the player. Below is a summary of the things we took notice
of:
Negatives:
-Battery life is upto 8.5 hours, about the same battery life as the older ipod mini. Not horrible but not great either.
-It’s only compatible with Windows XP. What were they thinking! Seems
to me like they were too lazy to make it work on other Operating
systems.
-The USB Cable and AC adapter are attached to the same chord, something I’ve never seen before.
-Comes in that kind of plastic casing that is painful to tear open. It makes you miss the easy-to-open Ipod packaging.
-The plastic piece that covers the port on bottom of the player can come off completely and easily get lost.
-ItÂs not suitable for viewing photos seriously. Jpegs come out
pixilated and too small. The ipod photo is vastly superior when it
comes to this feature.
-No FM radio
Positives:
-Very light and small design. Even though it isn’t that much smaller
than the ipod it has a very petite look. Also, the fact that it weighs
just under 3 ounces makes it a pleasure to hold and carry in your bag.
-Menu is very easy to use, takes about a minute to master.
-Color screen is decent, not incredible as it could be a bit bigger,
but then again the whole device would have to be bigger. Overall it’s
pretty clear and pretty colorful.
-Documentation is excellent, the manual and instructions are very clear.
-It’s the cheapest mp3 player with a color screen that can be found.
-Comes with a belt clip
-Overall sound is great
-Ear phones are good enough quality. But that may vary by how sound
sensitive you are. My friend thought they were great, I thought she
should use a better pair of earphones.
-Comes with a line-in cable
-Can be used via windows explorer as a mass storage device as well
-Comes with multimedia studio software to organize and transfer photos to it
Overall, my friend loves her new mp3 player. The Yh-820 is a good
and affordable player that is definitely worth $199 if you can get it
at that price.
Conclusion: **** 4 out of 5 Stars.
