Digital Trends

Samsung Yepp YP-T5V

July 28th, 2004 | by Ian Bell

Design and Features

The purple plastic-encased YP-T5V features a shiny mirror finish front face with an LCD display nestled in the middle. The design of the YP-T5V makes the player look more like a toy rather than a piece of electronics — but not cheap. With digital audio players having become a commodity good, we should not expect every manufacturer to dump a lot of money into fancy alloys and backlights.

Samsung's YP-T5V begs you to wear it as an everyday item without having to worry about scratching it. You wear the YP-T5V much like you do with other small digital audio players on the market; by the use of a necklace-like strap. The headphones that come with the YP-T5V feature a very long cable — long enough not to force you to wear it around your neck - and appear to be very high-quality. The ear-buds are a little on the large side, so if you have small ears, they may give you some fatigue.

The Samsung Yepp YP-T5V is almost half the size of the MPIO FY200

The controls on the YP-T5V are fairly straightforward in their locations. To the right of the LCD display, there is a joystick that controls the volume as well as the previous and next track selections. On the face above the LCD display are the record, A-B repeat, play/pause, hold, and microphone buttons. The button arrangement reminds us of a mini-clock radio, with the controls located just above the display. The YP-T5V supports seven different backlight options to choose from and the LCD display is fairly easy to read despite having a very small font.

Feature-wise, the YP-T5V has just about every option available with a few exceptions. There is a built-in FM tuner in which will allow you to record whatever you are listening to the internal flash memory. You can also decide to record external audio sources and save them into MP3 format using the audio-in and encoding capabilities. The YP-T5V supports the MP3, WMA and WAV audio formats but does not support formats such as Ogg Vorbis, or MP3 PRO. Power output is limited to 5mW/channel, allowing the YP-T5V can play up to 12 hours of music playback off a single AAA battery. And lastly, the YP-T5V can be used as a mass storage device so you can store both audio and data files onto the player. Samsung packages a USB cable with the YP-T5V so you can use this feature.