Digital Trends

Samsung YP-T9 4GB January 30th, 2007 | by Brandon King

Use and Testing

The most striking feature, beyond the small size and physical design elements, is the interface. The animated color customizable interface absolutely shines on this little player. Dots along the left side indicate which features you are selecting out of a list of nine. The default category is music, but the setting allows the player to return to the last activity immediately upon booting up.

Music is categorized very similarly to Windows Media Player, with the selection of Now Playing, Artists, Albums, Tracks, Genres and Playlists greeting the user at launch. While playing tracks, you can adjust the equalizer setting, activate street mode, change the play mode, change the visualization, the play speed, and skip interval. Street mode sounds like it boosts the low volume sounds and reduces higher volume sounds. You can think of it as volume limiting in both directions, providing a smoother audio experience that doesn’t require pumping the volume up. There are 13 equalizer settings in all, with four 3D sound settings and one user definable equalizer setting. Play modes include the usual suspects: Normal, Repeat, Repeat Once, and Shuffle. The visualizations really shine on the T9’s screen, and you can choose to have a pulsing circle, raindrop pattern, graphical equalizer, randomize between those choices, play music to a slide show, or just show the album cover. What’s nicer is that the power setting let you choose the display off-time from anywhere from 15 seconds to never. The visualizations look so nice, you’ll be sure to get a few crooked necks trying to catch a glimpse of what that fine, fine techno-gadget is by onlookers. Play speed settings, useful for listening to audio books and recorded lectures, go from ¼ speed to 3x.

The skip interval, again useful for audiobooks and lectures allows for skipping a track by clicking the next track button, or 3, 5, 7, 10, 30, and 60 second jumps instead. If you turn the T9 off while listening to music above the ‘20’ setting (half the maximum volume), it will automatically reset to 20 the unit is powered back on. The T9 supports MPEG 1, 2, 2.5 layer 3 up to 320kHnz, and WMA. We’ll leave you to figure out which of these features are available on the iPod nano…

The File browser allows for directly locating individual files and playing them. It also has a “Favorites” feature, which allows you to compile a list to be used for quick access later.

The FM radio tuner allows adding presets, auto tuning, setting FM region and FM sensitivity. FM regions include Korea/US, Japan, and the ubiquitously named ‘Other Countries’. This simply sets the range of frequencies and the tuning intervals. The Sensitivity setting range goes from High-to-Middle-to-Low.

The text file browser will just display the contents of a text file without formatting; nothing too exciting, but useful if you want to throw a quick grocery list or backup sheet of phone numbers.

The Samsung YP-T9 compared to some AAA batteries