Samsung Yepp 90S MP3 Player Review

Published By: Paul Machado
Review Date: September 23/2002
Product Supplied By: Samsung Canada

Audio Performance:

Music playback on the Yepp-90S is quite good I must honestly say but with a better set of headphones that is. The ones supplied with the product don't pack much punch and limits the user's overall listening pleasure. Don't get me wrong they are fairly good headphones considering the size but if you improved listening quality a higher end set of headphones is a must. What I did was place one of the jacks of my Z-560 speakers into the player and listened the music through only two of the speakers. The bass response was very good and the sound was quite clear. All that I wanted to see from this was the true potential of the player itself which is good. The total output for the headphones are rated 0.6mW (milli-watts) which is 0.1 milli-watt higher than the headphones included in Samsung's other MP3 players.

FM Radio Performance:

What I was very pleased to see included with the Yepp-90S is that fact that it had a FM tuner built in. It is programmable for 10 station presets. Since the player can hold only hold a limited amount of songs the FM tuner is a great feature a great to enhance your listening pleasure. Although don't expect great reception especially if your batteries are not fully charged. There is a significant decrease in reception from when your batteries are fully charged or almost dead of course. Since it does take some juice from the batteries to get a good reception you may want to have some spare ones if you plan on listening for a while. Also if the station is at a far range from you and your player the signal will obviously decrease significantly and so will battery life.

Microphone and Recording Performance:

A surprising feature to see on this MP3 player was the fact that it has a built in mono microphone that can be used to record conversations and so forth. The recording quality is fairly good but it very sensitive to background noise. Once again good battery life is needed in order to provide a clear recording. If the microphone is held close enough to the source it is very easy to understand what is being said during the playback of the recording. Remember though to not expect too much from this since it is not the main point of the product but just a nice little extra feature.

Battery Life and Performance:

The battery life I experienced with the Yepp-90S was overall good but not as great as I would have expected. As mentioned earlier it is due to the fact that some of the added features on this product that cause the batteries to be drained quickly. Now in the specs battery life is about 15 hours more or less. For some this may be plenty of time and for others this may be very little depending on how often it is used of course. Since it is only 2 AAA batteries you can't expect too much considering the amount of features on this product. The batteries included with the Yepp-90S lasted myself about a month of average use. An average of about 30 minutes a day of listening, transferring, recording and so forth. Not too shabby but not too great.