Not many manufacturers have embraced Microsoft's portable media centre to date and the last device we had a play with was the rather disappointing creative PMC which was just too big to be a practical portable device, at least on that front the Samsung is off to a good start. Measuring 97 x 107 x 21mm and tipping the Lordpercy scales at 225 grams without the battery it is by no means a bloater but not a supermodel either.

Clearly these devices are governed by the need to house a good size screen and the YH-999GS has a 3.5" colour TFT capable of 260k colours, from switching on the unit you are immediately struck by the brightness of the Samsung PMC's screen and the resolution. the decision to go with Microsoft's PMC operating system is in our view a good one, powering up the device opens a very familiar user interface with the deep Microsoft blue and a menu system that's simple yet covers all aspects that you need to operate and configure.

Thu GUI presents you with My videos and My Audio which very much matches the style of Windows media player 10 which is the other part of the package required to run on your host PC, ease of use is a major plus point of the Samsung and if you drive a windows machine on a daily basis this PMC operating system will pose no issues. Inside the YY999's shell is a 1.8" 20gb hard drive which stores all the media and also contains the operating system, we did feel that 20gb was a little stingy and 40gb would have been nearer the mark.

Windows PMC supports a very limited set of formats, primarily you have WMV and ASF for video and MP3 and WAV for audio plus JPEG for viewing images, if you want your device to play Divx movies or any other MPEG derivatives then you'll be into conversion. Again WM10 handles this through a control plugin for the YH-999GS and on our P4 3.06ghz machine a 2 hours Divx movie was pretty much real time to transcode to the WMV format.

Having got our files ready to play it's time to push them to the device, again in WM10 this is simple enough by selecting what files or directories you want pushed to your Samsung, the USB connection moves the files quickly enough but one big drawback is that the USB connection does not charge the device when connected. A full charge from the DC mains input takes 4 hours.

The Samsung YH-999GS claims some 10 hours of audio playback from a full charge and 3 hours of video replay, this is not great with today's battery technology and we managed about 5 hours of mixed video and audio use (1 movie and a few albums). The killer is that its never enough to play 2 movies just one and a half, which is quite frustrating.

Replay of the WMV version of the fast and the furious was smooth and very reliable, after waiting what seemed an eternity to transcode and download to the device! For the duration of the movie there was only one slight pause and otherwise both the unit and the screen coped well with what is a demanding movie. What also struck us was the quality of the inbuilt speaker, it's by no means ideal for watching movies but is so much better than we expected it to be, but of course you'll be using headphones for 90% of your viewing.

A really cool feature of the YH-999GS is the kick stand support that appears form the rear of the unit, Samsung have really taken some time to think about how the unit would be used and this slide out stand allows you to position the unit perfectly for viewing.

Perhaps that does sum up the Samsung PMC, a lot of careful design has gone into making a very useable device, there is a trade off between support for Divx and having a familiar windows interface and for our money they made the right choice. It seems well built and feels sturdy in the hands which inspires confidence in travelling with the YH-999, we'd have liked some form of external memory reader a slot foe SD / MMC or CF cards would have been a real bonus and we would really like to be able to charge via USB.

However we are here to asses if it does the basic job and indeed it does, smooth video playback, good sound reproduction and easy to drive, in the fledgling world of PMC's many others could learn a lot from this device.

The Samsung YH-999GS PMC is on sale now retailing at £369.99 which is a tad expensive for a 20gb PMC but for one that actually works, well perhaps its worth it.

Published - 28/01/2007

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