Cheap alternative to the iPod Shuffle
Portable music players come in lots of different sizes and capacities.
The largest, such as the iPod Classic, have big colour screens and contain hard disks so they can store huge amounts of music and video but are rather bulky.
More portable players such as the Samsung YP-U5A fit comfortably into a pocket, but only have either 2GB or 4GB of flash memory storage, so they hold less music, but still enough to while away the time on journeys.
The Samsung U5 looks like a typical USB memory key, with the addition of some buttons and a small black-and-white screen. A plastic cap at one end hides a USB connector, so the player can be plugged into a spare port on a desktop or laptop PC for charging and transferring media, without needing any cables.
This is handy because on larger players if you forget the cable you will be unable to charge the player and will be left without any music if the battery runs out.
Samsung has squeezed an impressive amount of information onto the U5's small screen. The track name scrolls along the bottom, the remaining battery life is clearly visible and if the song has any album art, this is also shown.
Playback is controlled with a set of buttons, with left and right skipping between tracks, up and down controlling the volume and a single large button in the centre to play or pause the song. The player has a 3.5mm headphone jack on one end and produced excellent sound. At maximum volume we did not notice any distortion in our tests.
The U5 is let down by its cheap plastic casing, which is not as good as the materials used for the iPod Shuffle. The cap that covers the USB connector is not attached to the device at all, so could easily be lost. However, since the 4GB model can be found for less than £40 online, it's excellent value and these problems can be overlooked.
