Samsung P2 8 GB Touchscreen Bluetooth Portable Media Player (Black)

The Samsung P2 is a flash-based portable media player with a 3" LCD widescreen (16x9) with slim-style form factor. Capable of video, music, photo, FM radio playback, the P2 will let you carry your media files with you wherever you go. Samsung has also embedded a Bluetooth 2.0 chip into the P2 so users can use right away with other Bluetooth 2.0 devices such as stereo speakers and headphones. Packed with additional features such as datacasts, alarm clock, world clock and calendar functionality, the P2 is an extremely multifunctional media player. Get up to 30 hours of music or 5 hours of video playback per charge of the internal lithium polymer rechargeable battery which charges whenever connected to the PC for extra convenience. P2 is available in Black, White, and Burgundy.

Customer Reviews
Overall good player,
By M. Kanai
Aesthetically, this is a really nice product from Samsung. The player is quite sleek, with nice rounded edges, a decent weight, and sharp piano black gloss finish. The sound quality is superb. I didn't get the same battery life the manufacturer did (they rate 30 hours, I probably average 20), but I would bet that's because I use the touchscreen interface more than their battery testers did.

As for the touchscreen, I have to admit it's pretty nice. I prefer tactile use, so I'm more of a fan of buttons than touchscreens, but Samsung has done a nice job executing this one. There are a couple of odd quirks to the touchscreen. For example, when you "swipe" the touchscreen to advance you have to swipe from right to left, which seems counterintuitive since you are advancing the progress bar from left to right. Obviously, the same is true of swiping to back up, where you swipe from left to right, even though you're going back on the progress bar.

Also, in the default menu setting, you make circular gestures on the touchscreen to advance through the menu. Neat? yes. Functional? not really. The biggest problem I had with this is that my thumb kept obscuring the icons as they moved into view. Ultimately, I found this too annoying and I disabled it in favor of a regular grid menu. Not as cool to show your friends, but much more functional.

The audio player functions are top notch. As a caveat to this, I will say that I could not get this to sync with Winamp 5.5. My Winamp crashed every time I loaded it when the P2 was plugged in. Instead, I did my syncing through Windows Media Player, and it worked fine. It synced playlists perfectly, and did a great job recognizing albums when I copied them directly like a mass storage device. The on-board player functions include a customizable EQ with quite a few presets and a clarity adjuster. There are preset visualizations including a couple of light shows (that do not track the music), album art, track info, and a spectrum analyzer.

The video player is pretty good, but I don't really like watching video on such a small screen anyway. I'm not a big fan of the fact that you have to convert through Samsung's software to get it to run, but I guess that's the case with most MP3/video players. The widescreen playback is properly formated. FM reception is satisfactory. Not sure how the eReader works since I don't have any ebooks for it, but you can see test screens of it.

This is, overall, a good MP3 player, even if it is a bit pricey. It is only $50 cheaper than the iTouch, but it also brings in an FM radio tuner and bluetooth support for up to two bluetooth devices--including a pass-thru for your cellphone to a set of bluetooth stereo headphones like the non-US release Samsung T9. Bluetooth is a great feature if you've got bluetooth headsets, speakers, or car radio. So you're getting more features than the iTouch offers. A major downside for me is the fact that it is primarily touchscreen-only (there are hard buttons on the side: on the left a lock button and a play/pause/power button; on the right, two volume buttons). Since I tend to like to keep my mp3 in my pocket, I prefer to have tactile skip buttons as well.

Samsung has made some great strides with their feature packed MP3 players. And while this one was almost perfect for me, it fell short of the mark only in the somewhat high price tag and the lack of hard skip buttons. I give them kudos, however, for having hard play/pause/power and volume buttons (FYI, play/pause and volume can also be controlled via the touchscreen).

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