Home > Consumer Reviews > Samsung P2 8 GB Touchscreen Bluetooth Portable Media Player (Black)

Aesthetically, this is a really nice product from Samsung. The player is quite sleek, with nice rounded edges, a decent weight, and sharp piano black gloss finish. The sound quality is superb. I didn't get the same battery life the manufacturer did (they rate 30 hours, I probably average 20), but I would bet that's because I use the touchscreen interface more than their battery testers did.

As for the touchscreen, I have to admit it's pretty nice. I prefer tactile use, so I'm more of a fan of buttons than touchscreens, but Samsung has done a nice job executing this one. There are a couple of odd quirks to the touchscreen. For example, when you "swipe" the touchscreen to advance you have to swipe from right to left, which seems counterintuitive since you are advancing the progress bar from left to right. Obviously, the same is true of swiping to back up, where you swipe from left to right, even though you're going back on the progress bar.

Also, in the default menu setting, you make circular gestures on the touchscreen to advance through the menu. Neat? yes. Functional? not really. The biggest problem I had with this is that my thumb kept obscuring the icons as they moved into view. Ultimately, I found this too annoying and I disabled it in favor of a regular grid menu. Not as cool to show your friends, but much more functional.

The audio player functions are top notch. As a caveat to this, I will say that I could not get this to sync with Winamp 5.5. My Winamp crashed every time I loaded it when the P2 was plugged in. Instead, I did my syncing through Windows Media Player, and it worked fine. It synced playlists perfectly, and did a great job recognizing albums when I copied them directly like a mass storage device. The on-board player functions include a customizable EQ with quite a few presets and a clarity adjuster. There are preset visualizations including a couple of light shows (that do not track the music), album art, track info, and a spectrum analyzer.

The video player is pretty good, but I don't really like watching video on such a small screen anyway. I'm not a big fan of the fact that you have to convert through Samsung's software to get it to run, but I guess that's the case with most MP3/video players. The widescreen playback is properly formated. FM reception is satisfactory. Not sure how the eReader works since I don't have any ebooks for it, but you can see test screens of it.

This is, overall, a good MP3 player, even if it is a bit pricey. It is only $50 cheaper than the iTouch, but it also brings in an FM radio tuner and bluetooth support for up to two bluetooth devices--including a pass-thru for your cellphone to a set of bluetooth stereo headphones like the non-US release Samsung T9. Bluetooth is a great feature if you've got bluetooth headsets, speakers, or car radio. So you're getting more features than the iTouch offers. A major downside for me is the fact that it is primarily touchscreen-only (there are hard buttons on the side: on the left a lock button and a play/pause/power button; on the right, two volume buttons). Since I tend to like to keep my mp3 in my pocket, I prefer to have tactile skip buttons as well.

Samsung has made some great strides with their feature packed MP3 players. And while this one was almost perfect for me, it fell short of the mark only in the somewhat high price tag and the lack of hard skip buttons. I give them kudos, however, for having hard play/pause/power and volume buttons (FYI, play/pause and volume can also be controlled via the touchscreen).

I wanted a video player that was easy to use with UnBox and other video sites other than iTunes (I have owned a 3G 40G and own a 4G 30G video and 3G Nano 4GB). Here are my initial thoughts:
Fast charging via USB
Easy to use Samsung proprietary software for music, video and RSS feeds
Nice User Interface with Touch Screen, bright colors
File transfer from UnBox a breeze, recognized immediately, very fast file transfer vs. IPOD
Easy interface to add, update and load RSS feeds
Drag and drop computer files for music and video
Syncing is much easier than an IPOD, does not sync all of your files to obtain new files to load
Updated firmware was fast and easy (Bluetooth upgrade)
Great sound quality and form factor
Cost per MB more affordable than an IPOD
Love it so far after 1.5 hours of use; will update once I have it for a week or two.
WORTH considering, like the fact that it does not require quirky Windows Media Player
Purchased for $200, which was a bargain vs. the 4G IPOD Nano
Considered the Creative Vision and Archos; Archos was more than I needed as I just wanted to plug and play and take this on a plane. :)

Update 1/20/2007: The Unbox and Vongo video downloads work great. Vongo at $9.95 per month gives a variety of videos to download (14 day trial). Vongo does load any video that you choose from your subscription (total rental fee per month) vs. Unbox which only lets you download purchases --- no rentals for portable video devices.

I also purchased the JabraBT620s Bluetooth headset and it paired immediately. Wireless music and video. However, the P2 does not support bluetooth with FM radio. Price for the Jabra is around $38-40 from an Amazon seller, 1/2 the price vs. other websites. When on Bluetooth, you can not change the equalizer settings.

Wish this were 16GB which would hold enough music and video; Samsung is coming out with 16GB model. However, this is not a deal breaker. Just means that you have to take videos off and swap them, and that would be the case with Vongo as you can download new videos all of the time.

When I take a plane trip this coming week, I will come back and update my review. Will be using Bose Quiet Comfort 1 with this player.

Just wanted to post that if you are in the market for a portable player, you should not pass this one up. I have the 4 GB version, and I rate the sound quality 10 out of 10 with some KOSS headphones mp3 encoded at 256. The screen is bright and clear, and while the volume has to go almost to peak to push one set of my headphones it is crystal clear when I get there, and every step before it! I am impressed by the sound quality, and highly recommend it.

i really wanted to give this product five stars but it has some real bluetooth limitations. i purchased this product primarily so i could be unwired in the gym. i also purchased this product because of its high quality sound ratings. it turns out in the bluetooth mode all the sound features are turned off and the equalizer and sound enhancement does not function. Also the FM radio does not work over Bluetooth, so if you want any sound enhancement or if you want to listen to the radio you still have to have those wired earphones/headphones around. i am using this unit with a Sony DRBT21G/B headset and all the remote control features work quite nicely. Sound is good but not as good as it could be if the equalizer was available. Bluetooth range is very good with line of sight operation out to the spec 10 meters with no problem. Except for these limitations the unit is a beautiful design and even with big fingers the touch display works well (although a bit slow on the equalizer screen when you do have wired headphones plugged in). The display is clear and bright and the menus are easy to navigate. A little nit is you have to carry another cable around as Samsung did not use a standard USB plug on the unit (probably because it is too thin). Also would have been nice to have include a mico SD slot so you could add memory.

This is one of the best media players I have had the pleasure of using. The screen is sharp and can be adjusted for indoor or outdoor lighting, the touchscreen is very intuitive and the thing is rigid - Anyone who's owned the old bar-style Nokias knows how rough those things are, and I've been though 3 of them. This player comes out of mosh pits smelling like roses.

The whole thing screams open - open bluetooth stack (with the firmware update), drag-n-drop music loading and the Samsung Media Studio that comes with it, while I'm not really fond of, has one of the simplest CD rippers ever. They even give you the choice of leaving that sound level guard for your hearing off, for those of us who remember personal responsibility (and live next to amps).

I was a bit skeptical of the whole DNSe thing they keep touting at first, but I cranked all the settings to max and everything sounds deeper and wider. The equalizer only has 10 levels for each bar, but fiddle with it for a few minutes and you get used to it. It's still a damn sight better than any other media player, but I'd expect nothing less from Samsung.

The touch screen is VERY sensitive. turn it face out if you're not doing anything particularly violent, because in my experience it will brush against my leg and I'll hear songs skipping around and stopping and the volume wavering. Also, Hell will freeze over the day I understand the point of music visualizations, as there are 3 visuals, and album art display, and tag viewer to choose from while listening.

One last thing: it doesn't play .avi videos. That's what I usually encode in, and the Samsung Media Studio crashes whenever anything divx encoded is re-encoded to mpg. So, no watching shows whilst on lunch at work, oh well. Why there's a radio I'll never know, but being able to record what you hear on said radio is tres-cool. I'll never have to sing akwardly to get one of my friends to help identify a song again.

It does what I want' has a no-nonsense approach to getting music on and off the thing, and looks minimal-chic doing it.

I give it a 9/10. I just wish it would let me assign names to call numbers , since I oft link it to my phone on walks and the like.