Samsung’s T10 is the next progression in their lineup of flash based players. The “T10” suggests an upgrade from the T9. This is true, but much was borrowed from the K3/K5 as well, - both nice players. The one thing that stands out is the design of this player. It has a solid build quality and the touch interface gives it a very clean look. However, tactile fans should be warned the touch interface can be finicky and the glossy piano-black (mines black) gets stained with fingerprints very easily. I am a stickler for cleanliness so I end up wiping the interface every few minutes and this freaks out my girlfriend!
The T10 has a hand full of other features that have been executed nicely and less common feature to the MP3 player market- Bluetooth. A great add-on and very useful esp with Bluetooth being so ubiquitous on most mobile phones nowadays. Exchanging songs, pics and a random file here and there between my Sony Ericsson mobile is now possible....and fun!
Official Website: http://www.samsungplay.com/microsite/trio/index_en_UK.html?language=en_UK
Quick Look
- Colors: Black, Red, White, Green, Purple
- Capacities:4GB / 8GB
- Screen:2" 320x240 pixel 262k Color Screen
- Size: 41.5 x 96 x 7.9 mm
- Weight: 43g
- Battery Life: 15 Audio / 4 Video
- Audio Support: MP3, WMA
- Video Support: SVI, WMV9 SP 320X240 @30 FPS
- Other File Support: TXT, JPEG
- Other Features: Voice Recording, FM Recording, RSS Feeds, Bluetooth headphone support, Bluetooth phone support
Accessories
The T10 comes with just the things you need to get started: the player, proprietary USB cable, earbuds, and Samsung Media software. There are a few cases for the T10, and in the past there have been speaker docks for other Samsung models. These may work since all new Samsung’s share the same type of connection.
Design
The design is definitely on point, sharing the same quality and attention to detail as some of the new higher end Samsung mobile phones. The T10 is designed in-house by Samsung and certainly is something you will be happy to hold in your hand as well as show off.
Black matte finished aluminum wraps from the back to the sides and part of the bottom face, giving it a high end electronics feel to it. The metal is infused with the black color and will not wear off. I ran the back of it across the corner of my laptop. The back of the T10 showed scratches, but I wiped the scratches clean and realized it removed the paint from my laptop like a like grain emery board. The same thing happened with a headphone jack I lightly ran across the back of the T10. Again, it removed metal from the jack and wiped clean from the T10.
The remainder of the player is a hard scratch-resistant plastic. It will scratch if you try hard enough, but I ran a few blunt metal objects across this plastic and it showed no signs of wear. The face of the T10 has a factory installed screen protector. I think it’s great that Samsung takes measures to keep scratches at bay, but it takes away from the overall esthetics. If you are going to be rough with your T10 you should probably leave the protector on, but if you use reasonable care and don’t lay it face down, you can remove it. Since what’s underneath holds up very well. But also a quick not about the face of the player: with or without the screen protector, it shows finger prints with every touch, so you will find yourself constantly polishing them off with your sleeve.
Screen
One of Samsung’s other core businesses is display technologies showing up in HD-TV’s, LCD screens, and recently the first consumer AMOLED display showing up on iriver’s clix2. Display technologies are something Samung is very good at and it’s apparent in the T10 (and past MP3 players). The screen is bright, colorful, and fast. The 320x240 262k color screen is top notch with very wide viewing angles.
User Interface
Graphical User Interface
The graphical interface it filled with all kinds of animated eye candy, especially being displayed thought the great looking screen. Samsung did something with the interface that was very right. Usually, if an interface is animated it hinders your ability to move quickly though the selections, having to wait for the animation to finish before pressing the button again. With the T10 you can press the buttons as fast as you want and it will skip the animations and get you to where you want to go. Well done.
Currently there are three themes to choose from; Samsung may add more in the future with firmware updates as they have with past models. The default theme has a dog running around greeting you at every menu option and even holds your album art for you. The second theme is familiar to previous Samsung owners being their “pendant” interface where each icon is shown in a blue circle. The last they call “My Theme”. This one is very basic only showing a small horizontal menu at the bottom of the screen- the rest is for you to display a photo. This theme will also allow you to choose 5 different colors (dark blue, pink, red, lime green) as well as a font.
Controls
The T10 shares the same button interface as the K5 and K3.The entire interface is touch, excluding the power/hold switch on the right side. There are 7 buttons that light when activated with a touch; they include a 5-way directional pad, menu button, and back button. These controls can be touchy and I found myself making accidental presses, so the hold switch is a must-use with the T10. I am not really a fan of the touch interface, but a tactile interface would have ruined the slick design. Although flat etched tactile buttons, as seen on Motorola’s RAZR as well as some of the newer Samsung phones, may also have worked well without sacrificing too much on design.
The one major problem with this interface is not necessarily the touch controls, but the biggest issue is that the volume controls are hard to get to quickly. If you are operating another feature in the T10 you have to keep backing out until you get to the main menu. Adding a volume button on the top right side of the player would have made a huge improvement in usability.
VIDEO UPLOADING...
Transferring Media
The T10 is an MTP device meaning you will be limited to Windows XP SP2+ and Vista until someone writes some MTP drivers for Linux and Mac. Drag and drop does work very well with both Windows OSes, but if you want more functionality such as playlists, you will need to use a media player to manage those.
Software
The T10 will work with many media players like Window Media Player, Winamp, Napster, Rhapsody, and others. Additionally, the T10 is compatible with PlaysForSure compatible ala carte and “to go” music services.
Samsung does ship the T10 with a media player of its own. It works just like the others but provides additional features such as “Datacasts” (see below).
Firmware
At the time of writing this review only the first version of has been released. The important thing I want to mention is Samsung works hard on firmware updates after they have released the player. As with past players, they add more features, fix bugs, and add themes. So keep your eye on abi>>’s Samsung T10 forum for updates.
Audio
Playlists
As far as playlists, the T10 can handle multiple playlists using media players but it does have 5 playlists for on the go use. The downside is each playlist can only handle 200 tracks and they cannot be reordered or renamed. This may be fixed future firmware updates.
Sound Quality
The T10 sounds decent, a bit above average, but nothing amazing. I hear a lack of warmth in the lows and openness in the highs. As I caution in every sound quality review, you will not be able to discern this lack of sound quality with the stock earbuds or a mild headphone upgrade. In test I used a pair of Future Sonics Atrio M5s and Sennheiser HD650s using the Toshiba T400 and Cowon iAudio X5 as benchmarks.
EQ & Sound Effects
I have never been a fan of Samsung DNSe sound enhancing technologies and I’m still not. I have more of a purist approach believing that artists’ music should not be manipulated to sound like it is in a “concert hall” or other various 3D staging effects. I don’t know too many people who like these effects, so I think DNSe is a wasted effort. Put a nice seven plus band EQ and maybe some bass boost for the bass heads, but stop with the effects; leave music alone. May be a minor complaint since they can all be turned off, but it’s more menu clutter that doesn’t need to be there.
I’m not going to go into how the effects sound, I have already expressed that, but the EQ does function very well. The seven band EQ is responsive and also includes an extra bass boost function.
Play Speed
Nice for audio books, the T10 features play speeds. These range from 0.7 to 1.3 times normal speed. The player won’t do any pitch normalization, so book readers may still sound like demons or chipmunks when enabled.
ID3 & File Folder Browsing
The main way to browse music is by ID3 tags, but file folder browsing is also available. The great thing about folder browsing is that it is a menu item under the artist, album, genre, etc.- ID3 browser. It is called Music Browser and allows you to view your music as you organized it on the player and keeps all the functionality of ID3 tag browsing.
Video
Video looks great on the colorful screen; video is fast and smooth. Natively, the T10 supports SVI (MPEG4, MP3 @ 44.1kHz, 128Kbps) and WMV9 SP 320x240 @ 30FPS. The specs seemed to be very strict since I could not simply drag and drop 320x240 WMV files to the player; nearly all WMV files needed to be converted.
Conversion
Samsung Media Player did a terrible job at converting video files. It was slow and was only able to convert a few WMV files. Windows Media Player did a slightly better job converting all WMV files and a few other standard AVI and MPEG files. SMP nor WMP could convert DivX or XviD.
The irony of this was I was able to get some DivX/XviD files to the Samsung T10, but I used Creative’s conversion software for the Zen to convert the DivX/XviD files to WMV then threw them into WMP to convert to Samsungs strict WMV file type. It really should not be this difficult. I would like to see Microsoft step up and allow conversions of any type of file and fill this gap for manufactures.
Pictures
Pictures look great on the bright screen. Features are standard and browsing is handled by a familiar matrix file folder browsing, along the ability to display a slide show at a timed interval you can set. Photos can be dragged and dropped in their native formats and viewed. If you import them using Windows Media Player or Samsung Media Player they will be resized to 640x480. Also note that native photos will take a bit longer to load considering their larger file size.
FM Radio & Recording
Radio reception was nothing stellar; the T10 picked up most all local stations but had a noticeable amount of static. The radio features many common features like auto presets, sensitivity adjustment, multi region support, and FM recording. Files are recorded in 128kbps MP3 format.
“Datacasts” (RSS Feeds)
Datacasts are Samsung’s fancy word for RSS Feeds. These RSS feeds are imported into the Datacast menu as text files for each story. The usefulness would be up to the user, but most of this is not automatic and each feed needs to be manually synced. To me it was more of a hassle than it was worth. There was also a note beside each of the feeds in the Samsung MP that would tell if there was an attachment for podcasts and video casts. But again it was not automated; you still had to click “download attachment” then sync each one. I think this is a valiant attempt but still falls short of ideal.
“Prime Pack”
On the main screen there is an option called Prime Pack. This is simply a menu for other features including Text and Voice recording. But looking at some of the other new Samsung players, “Prime Pack” seems to be a place for them to put applications. So there may be additional apps under this menu with future firmware updates.
Text
Text viewing goes a bit beyond basic. The text viewer allows you to bookmark long files for later recall; however, you are limited to one. Text size can be changed along with background and text color in the form of 5 themes. You can also listen to music while text is displayed with full control of the volume.
Voice Recording
The voice recording works like any other- recording in 96kbps MP3 format. One of the nice features not found on many players is that you can audition what you are recording though the headphones. The mic plays though the headphones as long as you are in recording mode, not just when recording.
The recording quality was good and could easily be used for note-to-self or lecture recording. The T10 does suffer from microphonic noises from your fingers against the back metal plate like many players do. This won’t interfere that much when you are taking your own voice notes, but if you are trying to record something like a class lecture, you will want to set on a non-moving surface so it won’t pick up those noises.
Bluetooth
I was able to pair the T10 with a set of Bluetooth headphones with ease. For now this is all the functionality the T10 has; however, Samsung states in their literature that phone integration is around the corner with a firmware update in November. This integration is supposed to add caller ID and the ability to answer the phone and talk though the T10’s built in mic and through the headphones.
File Browser
File browsing is a simple way to look at what is on the player. It will show all media and files allowing you to select them, play them, or read them. It’s a very nice feature for those who like to keep track of their stuff in folders.
Conclusion
The Samsung T10 is a beautifully and ruggedly designed MP3 player with a vivid and colorful screen which plays well with the animated GUI. There are plenty of functions to keep most users happy and Bluetooth phone support is a definite plus for the untethered crowd. Tactile interface fans may be somewhat disappointed since the T10 is strictly a touch interface. Sound quality is good but not great, but will only disappoint the very discerning listener.
All in all, the T10 is a good player with a really nice line up of features. May not be for everyone but if you like what you have read, I can recommend it since time and care was put into this player to make it right.
Pros
- Sleek durable design
- Great looking screen
- Fast animated GUI
- Factory installed screen protector
Cons
- No dedicated volume buttons
- Touch interface can be inaccurate
- Factory installed screen protector can look ugly and take away from the slick design
- OTG playlists are limited
- No audio bookmarks
- Video conversion is less than easy
For all of you who like what you saw and read - here is a great offer from Samsung on the T10 - not to be missed!
http://apps.vocanic.net
Just print the voucher and fly down to the Samsung flagship store for the discount - and don't forget to drop me a small "thank you" note ;)
Wishing everyone a Happy, Prosperous, Memorable and Musical 2008!
Cheers!
Abbas
