Samsung YH-920 GS Review

Overall Rating

Nice piece of hardware, some useful features like line in/out and voice record, data storage.

Atrocious software, can't believe they had the nerve to release it into the same market as the iPod.

On the good side the Samsung YH-920 GS has useful features as listed above, good heft and feel and comes with a good set of kit as standard (leather case, remote control, dock etc). It can work as an external HDD via USB, and record voice to MP3 via a built in mike at reasonable quality.

Not so good points:-

1 - Can only import music files from Napster using the software provided. If you want to import your CD collection you have to use a 3rd party encoder (Audiograbber works well)

2 - The software in general is not intuitive and very easy to get in a mess. I am fairly computer literate but it took me hours of messing around to get the whole process of importing CDs working smoothly. The user guide is basic and not well written and the online help files no better. Compared with my partner's iPod it is a nightmare.

3 - Once I mastered the process of getting the music onto the player in meaningful categories, the next discovery was that when you search for music by genre, it goes straight from the specific genre ( e.g. Trance) to a list of all tracks in the genre in alphabetical order, without the intermediate step of albums. With over 30 albums in some genres this is over 370 tracks. Horror story.

4 - Having got an album onto the player you can then delete the tracks from the album but not the album title, this can only be done by formatting the entire disk and reloading all the albums one by one. This is assuming that you haven't accidentally deleted your album list which is easy to do. Compared with the one click operation of synching libraries in the iPod this is ridiculous. Has no one at Samsung ever wondered why the iPod is so popular? Doesn't look like it.

5 - What the computer software says is on the player isn't necessarily what is on the player, there seems to be differences between the computer software and player firmware. You'd think they would have spotted somathing as basic as this in testing.

6 - It's prone to occasional stops and restarts and if there is a logic to this it certainly escapes me.

7 - On the Uk website the spec includes a built in FM radio, but doesn't mention that the European variant doesn't include this.

I would have taken it back after the first day had I not needed it as a voice recorder over the following few days and had to leave the country later.

Samsung have missed a real opportunity. With decent, well thought out software and proper product development and user testing this could have been a real iPod alternative. As it is the slapdash and apparently thought free implementation of this product is a sad departure from Samsung's usual high standards, and no-one at Apple or Creative Labs will be losing any sleep over it.