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Samsung Yepp Hip-Hop 64MB Digital Audio Player (Blue)

Samsung Yepp Hip-Hop 64MB Digital Audio Player (Blue)

List Price: $249.99
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A Superlatively Adequate Player
Review: I've had my Yepp for a few months now, and I've found it to be wonderful, overall. It has good sound quality, it's small and light to the point you can have it in your pocket while jogging and not be annoyed by it, and it's got a sleek design. There are a few points where the Yepp could use some improvement, however. First, it's too dependant on the remote control: the shuffle and repeate functions, the battery life indicator, and the song indicator are all on the remote, the only display on the player itself is a green or red LED. That's not a problem if you plan to use the remote a lot, but for me it's just one more thing to carry. Second, it takes a lot of power to record files onto the player. If you plan on adding and removing songs often, plan to buy a lot of batteries. Additionally, be aware that you can't insert new songs between old songs in the memory card. Finally, the player doesn't have upgradeable firmware. There's a new file format that ought to be out this fall sometime that'll have files half the size of current MP3s, and this player won't be able to play them. Sure, you can get a converter if you want, but it'd be better to get an upgradeable player that'll be able to hold twice the music in a few months. Still, overall, it's a great player and I'm glad I bought mine. You could do far worse than the Yepp.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Maybe it's pretty, but you can do better.
Review: I've had my Yepp for about a year now, and the headphone jack is just about worn out (you have to constantly manipulate the headphones to make it sound normal) and the battery case needs to be held on with a rubber band because an important piece of plastic snapped off. I don't know if this reflects on product quality or my treatment of it, but either way, it's no good.
Transfer times are painfully slow, and even worse when transferring to the Smart Media card (which you must buy separately, I paid about 100 bucks for mine). The Yepp comes with a version of RealJukebox you can't get anywhere else, and mine is constantly crashing and needing to be re-installed. Searching through tracks can be tedious, especially when you've got two hours of music to go through. On the upside, battery life isn't too bad, and the Yepp is very compact, lightweight and portable. But it's expensive, and for [a little more] more, you can get an MP3 player with a capacity in gigabytes, not megabytes.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: It's just about perfect.
Review: Ignore the whole "Hip Hop" style thing, which is just a little bit of a gimmick. Really, this is an ultra-tiny, perfect working MP3 player. I listen to a lot of house and techno on it, usually with VBR encoding, and although I've run against the 64MB wall quite a bit, the addition of a smart media card in addition to the 64 MB on board is a huge help there. Rather than just limit you to one card at a time, you always have 64MB, and a card, available to you for storage.

The sound is clear at low and high volumes, with no distortion. The provided earbuds aren't terrible, but the device sounds great with better headphones. I listen to music with a LOT of bass, and response is always tight and powerful.

In addition, the dongle remote isn't covered here elsewhere, so I'll bring it up. It's a standard sit-in-between-the-headphone-and-the-machine remote, with all the buttons you'd ever want, and an LCD display to show track and time listings, and is the only way to actually modify the equilizer settings. Although I wish that the spring for the clip-on feature had a little more oomph, I love that I can just put the main unit on hold, stick it in my back pocket (where otherwise all the buttons would be pressed all the time) and still be able to change tracks and volume.

I think that my only gripe is with the software. I HATE RealJukebox, and won't use it. In fact, I had uninstalled it from my system in disgust previously. It's got too many horrid user interface "features" to really make me want to use it. But rather than just giving you a way to copy tracks to the yepp over windows explorer, you have to use RealJukebox. But as that seems like a pretty common way to interface with small solid-state MP3 players, I can't complain that much about that. But consider that THAT's my only complaint, I'd say I'm extremely satisfied with the Yepp.

If you're looking at a solid state device, I cannot recommend enough the Yepp.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: It's just about perfect.
Review: Ignore the whole "Hip Hop" style thing, which is just a little bit of a gimmick. Really, this is an ultra-tiny, perfect working MP3 player. I listen to a lot of house and techno on it, usually with VBR encoding, and although I've run against the 64MB wall quite a bit, the addition of a smart media card in addition to the 64 MB on board is a huge help there. Rather than just limit you to one card at a time, you always have 64MB, and a card, available to you for storage.

The sound is clear at low and high volumes, with no distortion. The provided earbuds aren't terrible, but the device sounds great with better headphones. I listen to music with a LOT of bass, and response is always tight and powerful.

In addition, the dongle remote isn't covered here elsewhere, so I'll bring it up. It's a standard sit-in-between-the-headphone-and-the-machine remote, with all the buttons you'd ever want, and an LCD display to show track and time listings, and is the only way to actually modify the equilizer settings. Although I wish that the spring for the clip-on feature had a little more oomph, I love that I can just put the main unit on hold, stick it in my back pocket (where otherwise all the buttons would be pressed all the time) and still be able to change tracks and volume.

I think that my only gripe is with the software. I HATE RealJukebox, and won't use it. In fact, I had uninstalled it from my system in disgust previously. It's got too many horrid user interface "features" to really make me want to use it. But rather than just giving you a way to copy tracks to the yepp over windows explorer, you have to use RealJukebox. But as that seems like a pretty common way to interface with small solid-state MP3 players, I can't complain that much about that. But consider that THAT's my only complaint, I'd say I'm extremely satisfied with the Yepp.

If you're looking at a solid state device, I cannot recommend enough the Yepp.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Small but mighty
Review: It took me a while before I was able to jump into the MP3 universe. My problem was that I am a dedicated Mac user and the universe is a smaller place when it comes to MP3 players. After looking at all of the models currently available, I found the Samsung Yepp to be a near-perfect match. I say near-perfect because it does take a bit of effort to get things up and running (the manual is a disappointment)--but only a bit. First off, the CD shipped by Samsung with the Yepp does have Mac-compatible software that allows you to download MP3 files to your Yepp but it does not include software to convert audio files to MP3s. Problem solved, though: just go to the Apple web site and download iTunes--for free! ... Once you get used to the process, downloading files to your Yepp is relatively painless. Once there, the unit performs very well. Sound quality is excellent, controls are easy to access and work well and the remote is full-featured and accessible. The SmartMedia card slot also works with no problems. I have read other reviews here which say that you must have a Samsung proprietary SmartMedia card--not true! I purchased a Sandisk 64mb card, formatted it (a snap!) loaded it up from my Yepp and it worked perfectly first time out! You do need to be careful to purchase a SmartMedia card that operates on a 3.3v format--this info is clearly stated on the SmartMedia packaging. Some folks have complained about only being able to load about an hour of music on the internal flash memory. I can't say that bothers me too much. I've considered an MP3 player which actually has a 6gb hard drive but it is subject to skipping despite its antishock system. Also, they're bigger and heavier. You put the Yepp in your pocket or clip it to your belt or backpack strap and forget it's there. I've also read complaints about the controls being difficult to access and use--again, not true, for me at least. The remote's digital read out does not carry the name of the song playing and that is a bit of a disappointment, but considering all of the Yepp's advantages and its excellent functional and aesthetic design, that disappointment is merely a gnat on the windshield. This MP3 player is well worth the bucks. If you have any questions--especially Mac users--please feel free to send them my way .... I'll try to help.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: I'd wait or pass.
Review: Portability is the key feature of this nice little (about the size of a beeper) MP3 player with decent sound, reasonable sounding earbuds & adequate volume. Its controls are simple. The USB transfer is excellent with very good software to make the task painless. However, the price is still pretty steep, and to that you have to add the going price of another 64 meg card (about $100) to max this player out (128 megs will play about 2 hours of MP3s). That gets pretty close to the Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox price range, and this my friend is no Jukebox. I would either wait for the Yepp price to drop, or invest in the 'big unit' and carry 700 songs wherever you go.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: If you need tech support, forget this one....
Review: Product is excellent in terms of delivery of recorded files. The recording process is broken. Doesn't accept all standard smart media cards such as Viking media. Have had "range errors" when recording some files and software crashes. I have sent three emails to samsung tech support and they haven't even acknowledge receipt let alone reply. Check out their support page on the web. They provide you with a pdf file of the manual they sent with the product. These guys are way out of touch.

If you feel like you need any tech support to get this running, this IS NOT the product or company for you. Otherwise, after a month of use, it has performed as manufactured.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Samsung should stick to toasters
Review: Received this item as a Christmas gift. When I tried to install it (on a current, clean Compaq running Windows Me)I ran into the biggest driver problems I have EVER seen setting up ANY hardware. I followed not only the information that came with the Yepp (which when it comes to set-up leaves a lot to be desired) but also the supposed "fixes" for driver problems that are on the Samsung Yepp web page.

No luck.

Then called the Yepp 800 number for support three times, which resulted in three different people giving me three completely different sets of directions ("it's your Windows, uh...no, it's your hard drive...uh, no, it's the set up CD...). When one of these so-called "engineers" told me "well, we get at least 8 phone calls a day with this problem" I knew I was dealing with a product that was NOT finalized when it was thrown out onto the market. Bottom line: the Yepp was returned to the store. Want a user friendly Digital Audio player? Look elsewhere!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Cable Problem
Review: The player is great.......I bought this because I wanted good quality music and a compact player. There was only one thing wrong, the cable it came with was defective. My computer did not recognize the cable from the mp3 player. I switched the usb port and the scanner still worked, i installed the usb port manualy, it useually does it by itself, then i even downloaded help files from samsungs help page, finaly i talked to someone on tech support and he said it was just a rare problem, a defective cable. This is very rare, the guy at tech suport was amazed about how much I knew about mp3 players, and said I should be working there..So if you have any questions just email me at MytTy@aol.com And remember keep your invoice in a safe spot if something does go wrong, you can send it back easily to replace it.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: High Quality Sound, Small, Really Slow Data Transfer
Review: The Yepp Hip-Hop is everything you read. Small, light, great sound quality (especially if you buy better headphones, the ones that come with it I dislike), and best MP3 price/performance/memory ratio to date IMHO (Aug, 17, 2001).

But I have to add that the data transfer rate for this is not good, even though it uses USB, transfering 64MB to the player takes waaaaaaaay to long. This isn't a reason not to buy it, but you'll have to schedule your life around this fact.


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