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| In the fledgling world of PMC’s many others could learn a lot from this device.
Co-Published with lordpercy
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Samsungs first stab at the portable media player marker was a bit of a disappointment and to be fair to them its a tricky thing to get right, so with hope that they had learned from earlier mistakes we got hold of the new Samsung YH-999GS PMC for review. 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.
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.
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.
Read the full review at LordPercy.com
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