The Samsung Galaxy Player: A Media Device Review

In this review, we're going to take a closer look at the Samsung Galaxy Player, a media device that aims to compete with the likes of Apple's iPod touch. One thing that becomes apparent from the get-go is that the device has some issues with its user interface. The screen is a bit of a mess in terms of alphabetical order, with devices listed in the order they were downloaded to the device rather than alphabetically. While this can be easily rectified by manually moving each device into the correct order, it's still a bit of a letdown considering that an alphabetical sorting command could have been included in the settings.

Moving on to other aspects of the device, one of the standout features is its audio capabilities. The Samsung Galaxy Player boasts stereo speakers, which provide a noticeable improvement over many Android phones that only have one speaker for playing music or using speakerphone. While it's still not exceptional sound quality, it's definitely better than what most Android devices offer. When used without headphones, the device has a slightly trebly tone, with limited bass response. However, when paired with headphones, the sound quality is much more impressive.

If you were to remove the back cover of the Samsung Galaxy Player, you'd be greeted by a 1200mAh battery. While this may not seem like a huge amount of power compared to some other devices on the market, our experience has been that the device's battery life has been quite good – especially when used off and on. The lack of a cellular radio is certainly a contributing factor to this, but with strong Wi-Fi signals and minimal syncing of accounts, you can expect to get through a full day without needing to recharge.

The device also offers a removable back panel, which may appeal to some users who like to be able to upgrade their storage capacity. In fact, the Samsung Galaxy Player is available in 8GB models that can be expanded up to 16GB using microSD cards – a feature that's not available on Apple devices. However, this also means that the device has a slightly bulkier design compared to the iPod touch.

So, where does the Samsung Galaxy Player leave us with the iPod touch? The answer is that it doesn't aim to be an "iPod killer" in any way – rather, it's a separate entity that competes for attention as a media player. If you're heavily invested in iTunes and iOS, then the iPod touch remains the better choice. However, if you're already committed to Android and have invested in a wide range of apps across multiple devices, then the Samsung Galaxy Player may be a viable alternative.

Ultimately, the decision between the two devices comes down to personal preference. If you like the feel of an iPod touch and don't mind not having expandable storage, then the touch is likely still the better choice for you. However, if you prefer a device with more storage flexibility and a slightly larger screen, then the Samsung Galaxy Player may be worth considering.

In conclusion, our review of the Samsung Galaxy Player has shown that it's a solid media device that offers many of the features we'd expect from a device in its class. While it has some minor flaws, such as an awkward user interface and limited sound quality without headphones, it's still a compelling option for anyone looking to expand their Android ecosystem. Whether or not you choose the Samsung Galaxy Player over the iPod touch depends on your individual needs and preferences – but one thing is certain: both devices offer excellent performance and features that make them well-suited for music lovers and media enthusiasts alike.

The Lockerd.com Reviewer

Note: The article is written in a style similar to the original transcription, with each paragraph developed from the full text.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eneveryone brian with the unlocker.com here today with our full review of the samsung galaxy player 4.0 now there are two different versions of the samsung galaxy player there's the 4.0 version which we have here which has a 4.0 inch super clear lcd display with a resolution of 480 by 800 and then there's a 5.0 version which has a 5 inch display at the same resolution now to speak a little bit more about the display this display i anticipated was going to be a step down from the super amoled displays that were in the original samsung galaxy s you take out a nice display that was widely renowned as a as being a top-notch display and you replace it with an lcd display your initial thoughts are bound to be bad but this is actually a really nice display you can see here the viewing angles are almost 180 degrees so viewing angle is very good the colors are very rich and very vibrant and you can see here and this might be a little bit of a bad example because we've got a very dark live wallpaper here but colors are represented very well slightly over saturated in some cases but that typically is not a problem and is usually welcomed i certainly like a little bit of over saturation on the colors versus under saturated colors that you get on most lcd displays now on the the actual device we'll take a quick tour we do have on the right hand side we've got our power key on the top we've got a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack and then we've got this little door again for our micro usb charging and data sync cable and on the left hand side we've got our volume rocker and then on the bottom we've got our microphone so it's a pretty similar design in terms of what the samsung galaxy s series a phone was on the back we've got a couple of different uh little differences we've got two uh stereo speakers in the back where on the original samsung galaxy s we only had one speaker and then we've got a 3.2 megapixel camera that is not capable of shooting 720p so that's a bit of a downfall we'll talk a little bit more about the camera later but overall design styling and the display i've been really impressed with now the camera that's on this device like i said it is a 3.2 megapixel camera it does not shoot in 720p like the ipod touch does uh but the ipod touch has a pretty uh just absolutely awful uh camera in terms of still quality i believe it's a .7 megapixel still camera which definitely has always been a baffling point for me i'm not sure why apple chose to put that type of camera in that device other than obviously cost but the galaxy player wins when it comes to still image quality and it loses to the ipod touch when it comes to video quality in terms of overall performance i've been quite impressed with this device it's got a single core one gigahertz hummingbird processor and it it does run pretty quickly i mean we've got a live wallpaper here with falling leaves and as you move through your home screens you zoom in on this little bird's nest here and it's it's actually quite smooth there's a lot of devices even dual core devices like the droid 3 for instance which absolutely you just would not want to put a live wallpaper on because it just can't handle it and this handles it quite well now the biggest downs downfall to this device in my opinion is the fact that it's running this ugly just awful uh touchwiz 3.0 interface and i really wish they would have either left it vanilla android which is not likely for samsung to do on a non-nexus device or at least put you know 4.0 on here because 3.0 the customization options just aren't there it's it's ugly in my opinion i don't like all the squares that are behind the applications it's a little too ios for me and i mean frankly i mean you know you've got this uh little red uh places icon on top of this green box and it just doesn't look appealing i mean the colors are kind of random you get you know groups of green here that are kind of grouped up together and then you get like a random yellow and a random blue and that kind of thing and it's just not too appealing to me shouldn't be enough to sway anyone from buying the device but it is something to keep in you know in the back your mind i mean there's no way for us to edit this screen into an alphabetical order so you can see here i've got things that are all kinds of uh messed up in terms of alphabetical order because they're listed in terms of what was downloaded to the device first now you can manually move each one so we can grab navigation and we can bring it and put it wherever we want to so we could theoretically go through and alphabetize everything ourselves but really that's pretty stupid considering that that could have been a fairly easy command that could have been put in the um in the settings here but it's not there so it's just something to uh just something to keep in mind that uh touch touchwiz 3.0 really isn't the best interface that could be on this device now when it comes to audio uh this device i mean it's got stereo speakers so it's it's got a better audio experience experience without using headphones than most android phones do because most android phones just have one single speaker that's used for speakerphone and those kind of functions that you can play music out of but it typically doesn't sound very good this definitely does sound a little bit better it's still not great you're probably going to want to use headphones with this device but you know i've tried it with headphones uh without headphones it's a little bit more on the treble side there's not a whole lot of hard-hitting bass or anything even if you've got uh headphones so if you know loud bass is important to you the ipod touch definitely does a better job but overall sound quality has been really fantastic now if we remove the back cover you can see we've got a 1200 1200 milliamp hour battery which isn't a huge battery uh it's definitely on the smaller side but in my experience battery life has been pretty good if you're using this off and on you're certainly going to be able to use it all day maybe two days without needing a charge not having a cellular radio definitely helps a lot in terms of battery life if you've got a strong wi-fi signal and you're not syncing a whole lot of different accounts and things like that then then you're gonna find battery life is pretty good if you've got your display set to max brightness and you're constantly leaving the display on for web browsing and things like that obviously you're gonna get shorter battery life but in terms of audio playback this device should last you for a good long while in terms of video playback you're probably going to be able to get through two full length movies at max brightness and that's that's not bad so uh you know all in all the battery life is pretty good on this device and i would definitely put it on par with any other media players of this size on the market so i guess the question is you know where does this leave us with the samsung galaxy player you know don't even say the word you know ipod killer that's just absolutely stupid it's not here to kill the ipod the ipod touch is a very good device in its own right but it's a different platform than what samsung galaxy s or the samsung galaxy player is going after if you're heavily invested in itunes and heavily invested into ios and you have other ios devices then i'm telling you go with the ipod touch if you are heavily invested into android which isn't as easy to do because the ecosystem is just not quite there but if you if you are invested in android you've purchased a lot of apps for you know other devices uh then you might want to consider just sticking with what you have in terms of you know switching platforms for either device if i wasn't if i was an apple uh fan i i don't think the samsung galaxy player could sway me and if i was an android fan i don't think there'd be any reason not to go with the samsung galaxy player and move over to ios so like i said if you're already invested in one technology or one camp or the other then then don't bother switching you've got a device that's uh that's suitable for you if you're up in the air then you might want to go to the store play with both of them and see which one feels better in your hand see which one you like better the ipod touch is going to be a smaller device a slimmer device and the i the samsung galaxy player is going to have a larger screen a removable battery micro sd expansion so you can buy an 8 gig model now and then add you know 30 dollars to it in the future and be able to increase your storage by 16 gigabytes whereas you can't do that with the iphone so really it's going to be a personal preference both devices are very good and we've hoped this reviews helped you this is brian with the unlocker.com and we'll see you next timeeveryone brian with the unlocker.com here today with our full review of the samsung galaxy player 4.0 now there are two different versions of the samsung galaxy player there's the 4.0 version which we have here which has a 4.0 inch super clear lcd display with a resolution of 480 by 800 and then there's a 5.0 version which has a 5 inch display at the same resolution now to speak a little bit more about the display this display i anticipated was going to be a step down from the super amoled displays that were in the original samsung galaxy s you take out a nice display that was widely renowned as a as being a top-notch display and you replace it with an lcd display your initial thoughts are bound to be bad but this is actually a really nice display you can see here the viewing angles are almost 180 degrees so viewing angle is very good the colors are very rich and very vibrant and you can see here and this might be a little bit of a bad example because we've got a very dark live wallpaper here but colors are represented very well slightly over saturated in some cases but that typically is not a problem and is usually welcomed i certainly like a little bit of over saturation on the colors versus under saturated colors that you get on most lcd displays now on the the actual device we'll take a quick tour we do have on the right hand side we've got our power key on the top we've got a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack and then we've got this little door again for our micro usb charging and data sync cable and on the left hand side we've got our volume rocker and then on the bottom we've got our microphone so it's a pretty similar design in terms of what the samsung galaxy s series a phone was on the back we've got a couple of different uh little differences we've got two uh stereo speakers in the back where on the original samsung galaxy s we only had one speaker and then we've got a 3.2 megapixel camera that is not capable of shooting 720p so that's a bit of a downfall we'll talk a little bit more about the camera later but overall design styling and the display i've been really impressed with now the camera that's on this device like i said it is a 3.2 megapixel camera it does not shoot in 720p like the ipod touch does uh but the ipod touch has a pretty uh just absolutely awful uh camera in terms of still quality i believe it's a .7 megapixel still camera which definitely has always been a baffling point for me i'm not sure why apple chose to put that type of camera in that device other than obviously cost but the galaxy player wins when it comes to still image quality and it loses to the ipod touch when it comes to video quality in terms of overall performance i've been quite impressed with this device it's got a single core one gigahertz hummingbird processor and it it does run pretty quickly i mean we've got a live wallpaper here with falling leaves and as you move through your home screens you zoom in on this little bird's nest here and it's it's actually quite smooth there's a lot of devices even dual core devices like the droid 3 for instance which absolutely you just would not want to put a live wallpaper on because it just can't handle it and this handles it quite well now the biggest downs downfall to this device in my opinion is the fact that it's running this ugly just awful uh touchwiz 3.0 interface and i really wish they would have either left it vanilla android which is not likely for samsung to do on a non-nexus device or at least put you know 4.0 on here because 3.0 the customization options just aren't there it's it's ugly in my opinion i don't like all the squares that are behind the applications it's a little too ios for me and i mean frankly i mean you know you've got this uh little red uh places icon on top of this green box and it just doesn't look appealing i mean the colors are kind of random you get you know groups of green here that are kind of grouped up together and then you get like a random yellow and a random blue and that kind of thing and it's just not too appealing to me shouldn't be enough to sway anyone from buying the device but it is something to keep in you know in the back your mind i mean there's no way for us to edit this screen into an alphabetical order so you can see here i've got things that are all kinds of uh messed up in terms of alphabetical order because they're listed in terms of what was downloaded to the device first now you can manually move each one so we can grab navigation and we can bring it and put it wherever we want to so we could theoretically go through and alphabetize everything ourselves but really that's pretty stupid considering that that could have been a fairly easy command that could have been put in the um in the settings here but it's not there so it's just something to uh just something to keep in mind that uh touch touchwiz 3.0 really isn't the best interface that could be on this device now when it comes to audio uh this device i mean it's got stereo speakers so it's it's got a better audio experience experience without using headphones than most android phones do because most android phones just have one single speaker that's used for speakerphone and those kind of functions that you can play music out of but it typically doesn't sound very good this definitely does sound a little bit better it's still not great you're probably going to want to use headphones with this device but you know i've tried it with headphones uh without headphones it's a little bit more on the treble side there's not a whole lot of hard-hitting bass or anything even if you've got uh headphones so if you know loud bass is important to you the ipod touch definitely does a better job but overall sound quality has been really fantastic now if we remove the back cover you can see we've got a 1200 1200 milliamp hour battery which isn't a huge battery uh it's definitely on the smaller side but in my experience battery life has been pretty good if you're using this off and on you're certainly going to be able to use it all day maybe two days without needing a charge not having a cellular radio definitely helps a lot in terms of battery life if you've got a strong wi-fi signal and you're not syncing a whole lot of different accounts and things like that then then you're gonna find battery life is pretty good if you've got your display set to max brightness and you're constantly leaving the display on for web browsing and things like that obviously you're gonna get shorter battery life but in terms of audio playback this device should last you for a good long while in terms of video playback you're probably going to be able to get through two full length movies at max brightness and that's that's not bad so uh you know all in all the battery life is pretty good on this device and i would definitely put it on par with any other media players of this size on the market so i guess the question is you know where does this leave us with the samsung galaxy player you know don't even say the word you know ipod killer that's just absolutely stupid it's not here to kill the ipod the ipod touch is a very good device in its own right but it's a different platform than what samsung galaxy s or the samsung galaxy player is going after if you're heavily invested in itunes and heavily invested into ios and you have other ios devices then i'm telling you go with the ipod touch if you are heavily invested into android which isn't as easy to do because the ecosystem is just not quite there but if you if you are invested in android you've purchased a lot of apps for you know other devices uh then you might want to consider just sticking with what you have in terms of you know switching platforms for either device if i wasn't if i was an apple uh fan i i don't think the samsung galaxy player could sway me and if i was an android fan i don't think there'd be any reason not to go with the samsung galaxy player and move over to ios so like i said if you're already invested in one technology or one camp or the other then then don't bother switching you've got a device that's uh that's suitable for you if you're up in the air then you might want to go to the store play with both of them and see which one feels better in your hand see which one you like better the ipod touch is going to be a smaller device a slimmer device and the i the samsung galaxy player is going to have a larger screen a removable battery micro sd expansion so you can buy an 8 gig model now and then add you know 30 dollars to it in the future and be able to increase your storage by 16 gigabytes whereas you can't do that with the iphone so really it's going to be a personal preference both devices are very good and we've hoped this reviews helped you this is brian with the unlocker.com and we'll see you next time\n"