Samsung YM-P1: Portable movie machine
Samsung's YM-P1 is the first portable media centre from the company in some time, and with a stylish design and excellent features, it looks like serious competition for Archos
We haven't seen many portable media centres from Samsung, and the last one we reviewed (the YH-999) certainly didn't impress. But that only makes the YM-P1 even more of a revelation -- Crave got hands-on with it at CeBIT and our first impressions were overwhelmingly positive. This thing has some serious game.
Sporting a 30GB hard drive and a 102mm (4-inch) screen, the YM-P1 will cost £399 when it launches, which should be around April or May. The interface is comfortingly similar to Windows XP Media Center, and while it's more basic, the player does have wide support for all the various video formats. It will play DivX and other MPEG-4 files directly, and it will integrate fully with Windows Media Player. It will also record from and output to a TV, meaning you can record an episode of The West Wing without ever needing to use a PC.
The YM-P1's battery will provide six hours of video and 15 hours of audio. For photos, you can either transfer an SD card straight out of your camera into a slot on the side, or you can use the Samsung as a USB host and transfer them to the internal hard drive. Integrating all these features into a portable device has never been easy, but we won't have to wait long to find out if this device has got what it takes to become the definitive media player. We're chasing it down for a full review soon. -GC
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