Conclusions

At first glance, you'll certainly be mesmerized by its stunning, innovative design.  It is truly designed the way most would want such a product to be and Samsung happens to be one of the few companies that can manage to do this.  However, this is the perfect example of one of those few products that you really want to love, but just can't.  Why?  Well there are actually quite a number of reasons actually, all of which I will comment below in my conclusions.

Design

There's no doubt that its design will certainly grab anyone's attention.  It is designed the way a flash-based MP3 player should and its touch sensitive controls add to its overall high-tech look and feel.  This is certainly its most appealing aspect and I say this only because there's not much else to like about it. 

The Screen

Samsung is known for their high quality displays.  Fortunately, the YP-K3 does feature a quality OLED screen that will impress as long as you do not use it for picture viewing.  You don't have to worry about viewing angles and the display is bright an clear at all times.  While the high-tech blue/black interface theme truly looks great, it basically hides the imperfections.  With pictures, it fails to reproduce colors accurately and a majority of pictures simply looked horrible on its screen.

The Interface

This is one of the areas that fails to impress.  While I absolutely love the high-tech blue/black theme, the interface simply does not offer you much in terms of features.  It is as basic as it gets and even the playback options are lacking.  Also, there's some issues that appear to be in firmware where the player failed to list all tracks from the Library Properly.  Even when transferring a collection over that was precisely tagged, it would list Artists and Tracks more than once, making navigation a major inconvenience.

Sound Quality

Unfortunately, I was not too impressed in this area either.  Most of the music tracks were lacking bass and sounded as if the treble was set to its maximum.  Enabling the Bass Boost feature didn't help much either, but the 3D Sound option did provide better results.  Also, its signal-to-noise ratio is quite low and I found myself setting its volume almost near its maximum level.  Something to keep in mind if you plan on using it in noisy environments such as in an airplane.  Also, the FM Tuner did not provide very good reception and most stations did not sound too good either.

Battery Life

One of the few areas that did impress though was its battery life.  For its remarkably small footprint, battery life was certainly above average.  22hrs of battery life from such a thin player like this is nothing to complain about.

Final Thoughts

While I find the YP-K3 to be the sexiest player I've ever laid eyes on, I just can't help but be disappointed by its lack of features.  For one, there are no recording capabilities, even from its built-in FM Radio.  Second and most importantly was the lack of playback features, including on-the-fly playlist support.  The lack of features is not the only thing that did disappoint though.  I was not impressed with its overall sound quality and reception from the FM Tuner.  Also, there were some issues getting the player to properly display or read the transferred music files even though they were all properly tagged.  There are certainly some bugs in firmware and I do hope they correct them soon. 

The touch-sensitive controls, however, where quite a pleasure to use and were highly responsive.  In fact, they are the best I've come across and those who are a bit weary about them should not be.  They work extremely well and I was pleasantly surprised.  Another positive note is that the player did work flawlessly in a Vista environment and also works extremely well with WMP 11, meaning you can choose to not install their bundled software if you wish. 

The new YP-K3 is basically a product for those who find design and form factor to be the most critical and those looking for a simple, easy to use quality player.  Samsung makes quality products and this one is no exception when it comes down to its build quality.  You'll certainly be very impressed.  However, for the audiophile looking for a player loaded with features, this is one you'll want to pass on, not matter how tempting its unique, high-tech design my be.

More information on the new YP-K3 can be found on Samsung's Website.  The YP-K3 is available in both 2GB and 4GB varieties. 

Questions?  Comments?  Discuss the review here...