Samsung bills the YP-U2, its new entry level portable music player, as a USB drive and digital audio player.

It avoids branding the YP-U2 an mp3 player because of its playback support for open source Ogg Vorbis audio.

It’s widely regarded as a better compression format than mp3, but despite this it remains nowhere near as popular.

It plays other formats as well, including mp3, wma and DRM-protected content. But by not referring to it as an mp3 player, Samsung hopes the YP-U2 will appeal to open source users as well as those who care about compression codecs.

From a style perspective the YP-U2 doesn’t look bad. It has a glossy look and feel and the exterior appears to be scratch resistant.

Its transparent USB cap lights up with a blue LED whenever there’s activity. The cap is quite bulky though and despite having a slot for a lanyard none is supplied.

Menu controls are located on the front and side of the player. The front facing buttons (volume, navigation, enter/play) are large relative to the size of the player and they feel solid when depressed.

The side controls (on/off, pause, custom key) are considerably smaller but are still easy to find and press when the player is in your pocket.

One glaring design flaw is that the headphones plug in to the side of the device and consequentially the headphone jack sticks out and adds to the player’s effective width.

During playback, a song’s ID3 meta information tags are displayed but a major frustration is that when browsing for songs the player does not use ID3 tags, so you cannot search for songs by album, artist or song title.

You’re restricted to browsing by filename, so you’ll have to organise your music into directory folders for ease of navigation if you’ve got a large collection.

Our review model had just 512MB of space, which is pretty meagre given the ever increasing capacity of flash memory.

The YP-U2 does have a 1GB model, costing an extra £20, and a 2GB model, costing an extra £50. If you want to use it as a USB drive too, you’ll be better off with one of the larger models to prevent using up space that your music would otherwise fill.

Samsung’s DNSe 3D sound system is used for audio output; it attempts to produce more realistic and natural sound from audio signals.

This player will be a treat for those who can convert their CDs to Ogg Vorbis and listen via the DNSe output. Users also have control of the graphic equaliser settings and can even adjust playback speed. This could be useful for those learning languages or skimming through voice recordings.

Music fans who want to take advantage of these features shouldn’t rely on the mediocre quality of the earbud headphones supplied. They are also unusually shaped and as a result don’t sit well in the ear.

The battery is charged via the built-in USB connector and a full charge takes 2.5 hours giving around 14 hours playback.

A built-in microphone offers voice recording capability of a decent quality, saving input in wav format.

Music is transferred to the player via the straightforward drag and drop Windows interface but DRM music must be added to the player via Samsung’s Media Studio. Parts of the software are not fully translated from Korean to English, which is rather sloppy.

The YP-U2 will appeal to the budget conscious, who will appreciate the great sound quality (headphones aside) for the price.

As far as competitors go Sony’s NW-E003 looks more stylish and has far superior battery performance, but is hampered by its ATRAC DRM system.

The Creative Zen Nano Plus is more expensive but packs in plenty of extra fe atures.

Related reviews:
Sony NW-E003 
Excellent battery life, but Sony's insistence on using its Atrac DRM holds it back

Creative Zen Nano Plus 
Packed with useful features, the Zen Nano Plus should prove stiff competition for the Ipod Shuffle