There have been many challengers to the Ipods 20gb market crown, its a bit like a jousting tournament of old the fair maiden of mass market dominancy attracts the foolish locals to go head to head with the knights of the realm, so Samsung have put forward a rural lad who shows plenty of promise but can their 20gb YH-920GS deliver?

First appearances are good and the crowd are cheering as the silver clad Samsung YH-920GS rides into view but the name isn't exactly catchy and the white inserts fail to lift the rather dull metallic finish. Measuring 59x106x16mm the YH-920 is a bit longer than the Ipod the only real visual feature is the backlit blue LCD screen and it's blue LED that flashes every time you press a key.

But this contender has more than just beauty (which is just as well) for any fair maiden who try's to operate this device will find possibly one of the simplest and easiest to use interfaces around, the main menu has but 4 options, Now Playing, Library, FM Radio, and Settings. The front panel houses the 4 way control pad which allows navigation and scrolling of the sub menus and track listings, on the side you'll find a pair of shuttle buttons and a large power / play / pause button.

The codec support is rather impressive too with MP3, WAV, WMA, DRM WMA, Ogg Vorbis, and Audible.com files all supported by the Samsung, the DRM WMA is very significant but we'll touch on that later. getting media onto the YH-920 is also nice and easy with a quite speedy 2.0 connection.

However this tournament is meant to prove one thing can the Samsung with its' less than royal name topple the favoured Ipod, perhaps the key area is sound quality and here the Samsung ends up in the dirt, no matter what style of music we tried the replay was lifeless and thin a real lack of bass and punch. We thought this might be the somewhat uncomfortable cheap headphones supplied with the unit and so we switched to our Shure E3c's but to no avail if anything this further highlighted the Samsungs complete lack of balance and unconvincing attempts at bass reproduction.

We guess Samsung would rather us not move onto the battery life next but we do have to ask why it is only a 10 hour non user replaceable battery and why in our tests we couldn't get much over 8 hours, hardly a performance fitting of a Knight!

There are extras that an Ipod does not possess, like direct MP3 encoding (up to 160kbps) a voice recorder and a FM tuner but these are just not enough to overcome the YH-920GS failings in basic audio replay.

The only thing that could save the Samsung is a royal seal of approval and perhaps Napster adoption of the unit as their bundled MP3 player is enough to convince you to give it a whirl, also the low price of £185 is around £20 - £25 less than the Apple Ipod. Of course you get the Napster software which allows you to directly work with their online store hence the importance of WMA DRM files, but we did notice that this software was a little slow in transferring items to the player.

Overall we have to give this a thumbs down, sorry Samsung your other products have really surprised us but this one just doesn't cut it as an Ipod challenger, the audio quality is poor and battery wise its just not sufficient for daily use.

Published - 24/01/2006

More Mp3 Player Reviews-

[ Up ] [ Archos Gmini ] [ Rio Karma ] [ Creative Labs Jukebox Zen NX Extra 60GB ] [ Apple Ipod 4G ] [ Sony NW-HD3 ] [ Apple iPod Colour 20gb ] [ iRiver H320 SE ] [ Samsung YH ] [ Toshiba Gigabeat F60 ] [ Apple iPod 5G Review ] [ Archos XS202 Review ] [ Sony NWA3000 Review ] [ Creative Zen Touch 24 ] [ Sony NW-HD5 ] [ Zen Sleek ] [ Archos Gmini XS200 ] [ Sony NW-HD1 ] [ iRiver IHP-140 ] [ Cowon IAudio M3 ] [ Apple Ipod 40gb ]