USB Cable, line in cable, ear phones, belt clip and charger[/quote]
The last and most important piece is the actual device.

By the looks of things, everything is in order.

Page 3 : Specifications

The following information was copied from Samsung's webpage:

Page 4 : YH-820

Right off the bat, we can see that the YH-820 is significantly larger than the YP-T7Z. More space is needed to accommodate the hard drive.

Since the YH-820 has only a few features, it doesn't require as complex of a navigating system. A basic seven button setup does the trick for Samsung.

The back of the unit doesn't have very many useful features. We see that there's a ‘reset’ button can be pushed. This will restore the unit to the factory settings.

The top edge has a few useful features.

The built in microphone is located at the top. This immediately tells you that you can take advantage of the 5GB of storage by recording lectures or by creating a personal diary of your day. Two different jacks, line-in and earphones, are also present at the top.

The bottom of the YH-820 has the communicator port protected by a removable plastic cover.

I think Samsung could have done a lot better here. The removable plastic cover can easily get caught and come off. After that, you'll lose your cover exposing the header to dirt, dust, humidity and whatever else may be in the environment. A flexible flap that is permanently fixed on one side will certainly be better than this single piece.

When I compare the YH-820 to all of my other MP3 players, I was surprised by its weight. Despite the larger size, the plastic body and simple design keeps it very light. It most definitely won't be weighing you down.

Page 5 : Setup and Software

The first thing to do with the YH-820 is to charge the batteries. The first charge will take 3 hrs and recharge times will be around 2.5 hrs. Noted in the manual is the fact that you should
not
charge the unit for more than 12 hrs as it will then pose as a fire risk.

The split USB/Power connector allows you to charge the unit and connect the YH-820 to your computer without having to unplug the player.

While charging, the connector on the YH-820 glows red.

After the charge is complete, the LEDs will glow green.

Once the unit is fully charged, you're ready to move some tunes over. You'll need to get hold of the provided CD and install the software.

In order to transfer music to the YH-820, Samsung packages the Napster client by default. However, if you visit Samsung Canada's webpage, you can get away from that option by downloading and installing the Samsung Music Studio.

This was a blessing in my mind. The original Napster client required a free registration of the software just to use it! While it was nice to be able to purchase songs that I didn't have, the physical process of transferring tracks was annoying. I wasn't able to transfer an entire album, instead I was forced to highlight all the songs and drag them to the YH-820 icon. I'm glad that's over with!

Upon firing up the Samsung Music Studio, it looks very much like WinAmp with a different skin.

The Samsung Music Studio creates playlists that you transfer over. All you need to do is select the directories or songs that you want and add them to your playlist.

Once you have all the songs you want, click on ‘transfer to portable device’ and wait for it to complete.

Whola, you're done. Far less frustrating than the Napster client. There's no need to register or login to use the Samsung Music Studio. I still would've preferred a simple drag and drop from Windows Explorer to the removable device.

Moving on to the other piece of software, the Multimedia Studio that Samsung packages is very easy to use.

Simply run the software and navigate yourself to the directory of the images you want. Select the pictures, right click and transfer to the device.

You will be prompted to pick the device you want to transfer too.

The transfer will begin after you decide how to resize the pictures and a pop-up window will appear once the transfer is complete.

Now that we have everything we want on the player, let's prime it for playing. We first take hold of the belt clip; an excellent idea since you really don't want something so bulky down in your pant pockets, let alone scratch up the beautiful screen.

With the belt clip in, we'll plug in the ear phones and go!

Page 6 : Performance

There are a number of things to test out with the YH-820. The most important thing for me, apart from functionality, is ease of use.

By pressing and holding on the ‘Play/Pause’ button, it'll take just under twenty seconds for it to boot. I think this is a bit on the long side.

In the main menu, it's very easy to take your pick as to what you want to do. Each option has text telling you what it is and a picture for visual display.

The main section is the play list window. There are four lines of display and three of them move – this makes it a bit hard to capture on my camera.

Much like the other Samsung MP3 players, pressing the up and down button controls the volume. The range is 0 to 40. 40 is quite loud, probably too loud and slightly distorted for most ears.

The speakers provided are exactly the same as the ones used in the YP-T7Z. They are very flexible and thin, which makes me wonder how much of the cable is actually wire. My greatest worry is that the wire is so thin that it could be easily torn rendering one or both of the earbuds useless.

While it's hard to compare the quality of the sound, since we all have different tastes, I can say that the sound is nicely balanced in order to accommodate all sorts of music. A lot of audio changes can be made in the equalizer (see below for more details), and if you buy your own pair of headphones the audio quality will most certainly improve.

All of your music is sorted in four different categories: Artist, Albums, Tracks and Genres.

While navigating through my songs and switching between artists, I found a slight lag in the menu. I found this to be a bit annoying and it should definitely be remedied in a firmware upgrade. The delay is usually 2 seconds or so.

Switching over to the second key feature is the picture viewer.

The picture quality is quite nice. A variety of colors are present.

A bonus feature is that you can continue playing songs while checking out your pictures. Another option with the picture viewer is playing a slide show. This is only available if you make a slide show with the Multimedia Studio. I would've liked it to be an automatic feature.

A small integrated camera, like on phones, would of been a great bonus. With 5GB of storage space, you won't have to worry about space and you can then show off your pictures in a slideshow.

While we now know how to use the YH-820, we'll wrap things up by taking a quick look at some of the settings we can change.

To change any of the settings, navigate to the option and press the select button. It will either cycle through the options or take you to a window that outlines more options.

Within the EQ, there are nine options: Off, Jazz, Classical, Pop, Rock, Bass boost, WOW, SRS Settings, and TruBass.
WIth the SRS Settings, you can vary the SRS Level from 0 to 10, adjust the TruBass from 0 to 10, the Focus Level from 0 to 10 and set your preferences to be Optiminal for Earphones, Headset, Speaker or Carpack. The rest of the options are pretty self explainitory. If you find yourself in the ‘About’ page, you will find out the number of tracks you have stored, the total capacity, the capacity remaining and the current version.

We're going to cap everything off on the next page.

Page 7 : Conclusion

As we wrap up another MP3 player review, I'm wondering what future steps Samsung will be taking to improve themselves in the market. While they are the king of LCD products, they still have a few things to work on for the portable audio devices. The whole 5GB storage option is great and pairing it with a color LCD display for pictures is a very nice touch.

The one thing that certainly needs improving is on the software side of the system. The third party Napster software is no where near as easy as a basic Windows Explorer drag and drop. I'm glad Samsung Canada has made an alternative available to everyone. The second side of the software that needs to be improved is the actual software performance of the YH-820. While all the features are present and easy to navigate, it's laggy. Without an option to overclock, we'll have to rely on Samsung to speed up the software!

In the future, I'd like to see Samsung offer several other models with additional features. A FM Tuner and Text viewer that you can synchronize to download the latest news off the internet would be awesome. An integrated camera with 5GB storage space could also be planned. The number of potential options is limitless, and with time I hope to see more integrated in.

Advantages

• Plenty of storage space

• Easy to navigate
• Lightweight

Disadvantages

• Sluggish software

• Napster Software (use Samsung Music Studio)
• No drag and drop from Windows Explorer
• Lots of uncapitalized potential

Overclockers Online would like to thank Samsung Canada for lending us this sample for evaluation.