Samsung YP-Z3 8GB Z3 Ruskin MP3 HD Player - Pink

Welcome to the Samsung YP-Z3 media player and my first gripe, why can't manufacturer's give these products a simple name? Apple did it and look at the popularity of their products! Anyway the Z3 is a small, 81x39x10mm, media player that facilitates music, video, picture, FM radio, voice recording via the built in microphone and text playback. Text however means standard .txt files so don't think you'll be reading many books on it, and at the same time, with a screen size of 1.7" full-length movies are out for those us optically challenged.
The unit will play almost any audio or video file format you throw at it and with its non-expandable internal memory of 4Gb has a quoted capability of 30 hours playback with 192kbps audio files, 7 hours playback with FLAC or similar high quality audio files and 3 hours of video.
The unit is logically laid out with the on/off and volume switches along the top edge, USB and 3.5mm stereo headphone jack along the bottom and a 4 way navigation button with centre press located just below the menu and back buttons which themselves sit just below the screen. Operation is simplicity itself, the controls operating in a logical manner and anyone who has used similar devices in the past will have no difficulty quickly getting to grips with this player.
Sound quality is perfectly acceptable and the bundled headphones are reasonable and streets ahead of the lamentable units given out with Apple's products. The unit can only be really assessed when you connect them to a good pair of headphones, in my case Bose noise-reduction cans and again the sound produced was perfectly acceptable for a unit of this size and price.
I have seen a number of other reviews for this unit which have scored it very lowly because of its battery life. I can only speak as I find and after it's initial charge I got 15 hours of music play from it and I suspect that this should rise after a number of charge/discharge cycles, so I cannot fault it in that respect.
However, I now come to the point that has reduced a 5 star review to a 2 star. According to the instructions the device allows drag and drop file transfer from the PC to the player and it does do this but to my astonishment, the tracks are all over the place, which means that listening to audiobooks, classical music or musicals where track order is critical becomes impossible. Digging into the manual reveals a note that says, and I quote, 'The order of files on your PC will differ from the order of files in your player'! Delving around on the Samsung web site comes up with the suggestion that files can be forced into order by sequentially numbering them. So, my workaround was this - with the three audiobooks I wanted to copy I had to preface the title of each track with a track number, I started at 101 for track 1 of book 1, 201 for track 1 of book 2 and so on. Even so the books would not play in correct order in the Album view but would when the 'song list' option was chosen. To achieve this took me around 6 hours of messing about but unless I'm missing something very obvious seems the only way to get it to work. Even installing Samsung's synchronisation program 'Kies' didn't help.
So after all that what do I finally think? Well, for a small, go anywhere media player I think it's good but it's let down terribly by it's inability to order files simply and correctly.
Incidentally, if anyone reading this review spots what I'm doing wrong please let me know, I really would like to use the player for audiobooks.

Right, let's get the vexed question of battery life out of the way first, since this seems to be the major complaint from the initial reviews. This is dependent on various factors, in the main the bitrate of the tracks, along with playing volume among others. The manual states for MP3s:

192kbps - up to 30 hours
>200kbps - up to 8 hours

and this at volume level 15, which is taking it fairly gently on the scale.

Since downloads seem to mostly come into the latter category, you are in general not going to get anywhere near 30 hours. I have been getting 10-11 hours out of it with the music I have been playing. It is quick to recharge, in around 15-20 minutes.

In short, the battery life, while not as good as my iPod Nano, is perfectly fine.

No, the real reason to dislike this player intensely and vehemently is the total inability to organise music correctly on the player. Heaven knows that I have had no end of issues with the infernal iTunes app in this respect, but this device makes iTunes look positively user-friendly.

Firstly, it does not recognise the album and artist tags in M4A files (the default format imported by iTunes). Thus all such files I transferred across were lumped into album "Unknown" and artist "Unknown".

I tried importing some CDs afresh in MP3 format using Windows Media Player. Although the track names and ordering were fine, I copied the files across to the player by drag-drop. One album lost its track names entirely and were renamed Track 1 etc., and the others had the track order resorted by some algorithm I am unable to comprehend - not random, not alphabetical but some kind of unfathomable semi-alphabetical system. I tried the same using the Kies application for PC to do the synchronisation - same result.

I tried the same with iTunes, importing in MP3 format. Again, despite the track names and ordering being fine in iTunes and on iPod, here the order has been changed. Unlike WMP which allows you to prepend track names with a track number, here the tracks have simply been ordered alphabetically.

I am completely unable to discover a way of getting my ripped music to play in the correct order with this device, other than possibly individually renaming each track to prepend with 01, 02 etc. Do the manufacturers ever consider anyone other than the yoof with their "tunes" and "playlists" and "shuffling"? What about those of us who listen to classical where everything needs to be in sequence? Like Mr Preview, I want to listen to all the right notes, AND in the right order.

Oh, and to add to these problems, some of the "native" MP3 albums which I have downloaded as such, and which play perfectly fine on iPod, have issues on this player - some sound glitches and dropouts and even horrible feedback style buzzing. This is exactly repeatable in the same places on the tracks in question, and must be down to the quality of the player rather than anything else.

The player auto-locks while playing after no buttons have been pressed for a few seconds. This is fine, but conversely it's a bit of a pain to pause playing quickly. You must press the on-off button, then wait about three seconds for the unlocking animation to finish before you can press pause - I seem to have to press it twice as well, unless it is still in the process of unlocking on the first press.

If you want to remind yourself what is currently playing (the screen going blank a few seconds after starting play), pressing a button only shows the title, or rather that small portion of it which fits on the screen, for literally one second, before the screen goes blank again - no time to read anything. (It should also be noted that the display font used is a horrid block font a bit like something from the old green screen days.) It also lacks a track progress bar and time remaining indicator (though does have a time into track indicator), which I always find useful on iPod.

In summary, I'm finding it difficult to find any redeeming features whatsoever about this player.

These yp-z3 players seem to have a design fault where the battery doest last more than 3-4 hours. Its a shame as its a decent little player although some controls are a little fiddly, like trying to delete tracks.

How Samsung can claim up to 30 hours playback time defies belief as its impossible.

Avoid, as its on charge more than its playing so its a waste of money.