Customer Reviews

Samsung P3 Palm Theatre Plus 16 GB MP3 Player (Black)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Allow me to clear things up. The P3 is an EXCELLENT player. In my opinion, the only competition out for it would be the zune HD and cowon s9. soundwise the s9 and p3 are even but both better than the zune.

You'll notice alot of people complaining about the included software (emodio) crashing and not working well. though this is true, there is very little sense in opening up a program and creating a library and "syncing" when all you really had to do was drag and drop. its not like you have to convert anything on the p3, why use fancy software thats glitchy? bottomline, ditch emodio and all other programs to be honest. just drag and drop.

the layout is customizable to your liking. few owners realize that you can easily make your layout from scratch with your own icons and fonts and things. its all explained on anythingbutipod[dot]com forums.

many complain about a laggy or insensitive touchscreen. those people are behind. the touchscreen issue was fixed months and months ago. they've release multiple firmware upgrades (contrary to everyone claiming theres no support for the p3) also available on the p3 forums of abi.

all in all the player turned out to be well rounded. an updated no frills breakdown would be

PROS:
1) sound quality
2) build quality
3) customizable themes
4) ridiculous amount of file extension support (converting isnt necessary)
5) DRAG AND DROP!
6) cheapest top tier player out
7) screen quality
8) vast amount of online support @ anythingbutipod
9) built in speaker

CONS:
1) lack of wifi (for some this is an issue)
2) EMODIO IS SPAWN OF SATAN!
3) not widely available. Finding in a local store is difficult
4) stock headphones are tolerable but not great.

The P3 is my second MP3 player (first was an old Iriver player that was terribly user-unfriendly). I've only had the player a few days, and in general like it, but it does have a few minor flaws.

1) the Emodio software stinks. I've had only one crash, but it's annoying to lose the info you just typed in. It isn't as flexible as I'd like to see. For example, if I want to put some video I just took on my Canon high-definition recorder onto the P3, here's what I had to do to achieve that:
1) Use Nero Vision to convert from high-def to mpeg-2 480x272 resolution.
2) Then use Emodio to convert from mpeg2 to svi, as it doesn't allow mpeg files to be used. Conversion is slow. I want to be able to just convert once at most.

2) I find the touch screen is not sensitive enough - I end up pressing several times to activate an option. Having an adjustment for sensitivity would be a blessing.

3) I don't use Bluetooth or any of the music manager programs so I can't comment there. BUT it surely is a pain to have to change the filenames of all my music so that it comes up properly in Emodio. I use the format "Artist - songname"; Emodio then imports the whole string into artist field and strange things happen. Makes it hard to use. So I ended up modifying the ID3 tags for over 900 songs just to make it work properly on the player. Yech.

Forget about getting support on their forum; it's in Korean and I didn't find an English site. I ended up using the site anythingbutipod dot com for info.

4) I haven't found the charging issue to be a hassle - I just bought a combo pack with 2 USB-compatible chargers; one for AC power, and one for car cig lighter. No problem there.

5) I REALLY would like for future players to have a user-removeable battery - this way if the battery dies you can just replace it and carry on. Or being able to swap out batteries for longer use would be handy. I can do this on my cheap LG phone, so I don't see why it wouldn't be possible with these kind of players.

The widgets are just dumb so I ignore them. My wife LOVED the sleep timer with the cat, as I expected she would.

All in all though, I do like the player, and may buy another one for the wife.

I have always liked Samsung products but their MP3 players are rarely compatible with Macs. I am running snow leopard and this works on my mac. Before this player I owned a an 8gb first generation iPod Touch. To use it as an external drive though you have to go to settings> system> pc connection> UMS.

I like this much better than my iPod. It is smaller than the iPod touch but the screen is really clear and with the latest firmware the touch is responsive. I have pretty small hands so I could see if you have large hands how one would have a problem with that. It has music, videos, photos, flash player, alarms, FM radio, address book, bluetooth, voice recording, text viewer, games, calendar, calculator, rss feed reader, and subway maps. The ipod touch i had didn't have bluetooth, flash player, or FM radio. I like listening to NPR and radio in general so I had to go with this. The reception is actually really good too.

The sound quality is amazing. It is way better than my ipod. This unit doesn't have wifi but i don't need it anyways since where i live there is no signals anyways. Even on the ipod touch i rarely used the wi fi.

Bottom line, I love this mp3 player. It is small, compact, sleek, and with all the features and current price it is a steal.

Many people have written about the P3 itself and I agree with most of the positive reviews. It has a wonderful display, good functionality, very good sound - you can read about all that elsewhere.
My beef is with the PC software. The P3 does not work with good music managing software like WinAmp and certainly not with iTunes. Actually WinAmp crashed when I connected the P3.
It requires you to have Windows Media Player 11 installed. I am not a big fan of Windows products, but I bit the bullet and set up a library in WMP and used it to transfer my stuff to the P3. That went ok, except WMP does not transfer any album art! A quick search on the web reveals, that there is a firmware incompatibility between WMP and Samsung products. I have not found a workaround - no dice.
What's the point in having such a terrific screen, if you cannot enjoy the album art?
So I decided to try the software that comes with the player, called EmoDio. Naturally you have to set up yet another library and search for and download all the album art yet again. And that is a slow process!! Not like in iTunes! It's much slower and less than perfect. The software is not written that well, it seems. The program crashed several times after downloading the artwork for 15 albums or so. It seems to be hogging and not releasing memory and eventually I got a 'out of memory' warning. The program crashes and all you have just downloaded is gone! I am now in the process of doing it again in small batches, shutting it down in between etc. But it does load the artwork onto the P3 - eventually. Sometimes it requires 3 tries!
BUT: EmoDio does not sync between the library and the player. If you make changes to your library, you have to manually load or delete those from/to your player! Not very good at all!
Other than that EmoDio does have a good setup and some interesting features I have not yet fully explored.
I bought the P3 because I wanted to get away from the iPod/iTunes ball and chain. But boy, dealing with these issues makes you appreciate how well Apple hardware interacts with the software!!
Oh yeah: No podcast support in either WMP or EmoDio! The P3 plays the files, but you have to manually download them from the web and upload to the player. I honestly do not know if I can live with this kind of hassle.

Edit: The best music managing software I have found so far to work with the P3 is Songbird from the good folks at Mozilla. It transfers the album art without fail and sync is a breeze. The only downside: It does not support Podcasts (yet). Those I still download with iTunes and transfer with EmoDio - sigh.

Interface is great, love the touch screen. You might want to consider some sort of casing for the player. I haven't had any incidents yet but it's very thin and might not take a fall very well.

Music/video: Music sounds great, movies work just fine (haven't had any codec issues yet). The fast forward/rewind on movies is pretty quick so if you're only jumping ahead/back 20-30 seconds, you barely need to hold it. Not really an issue, but the music/videos that come with the device are pretty dumb but those deleted without hassle =]

I haven't used the bluetooth feature yet so I cannot report how well it works.

Software note: I didn't bother installing the the software(emodio) for syncing. Seemed like more of a hassle than dragging & dropping folders onto the device. Simply changed the USB mode on the device to UMS and it opened in Windows explorer like any other USB storage device. If you do install emodio, don't bother using the converter for video files. Most will play without a problem (tested with .avi).

I have been listening to music with a critical ear for more than 4 decades. Subtlety and fine detail in the reproduction of a piece of music make a difference to me between real enjoyment and just listening to a car radio. This player (and yes, you need a good pair of ear-buds/phones) went way beyond my expectations for the price-range.

The software and interface could use a little help yet are manageable. But the sound...

This thing is great,, in many ways,, in others it is a bit lacking. First the bad. The EMODIO program they want you to use is absolutely the most frustrating worthless thing I've ever tried to use. Just switch the player to become a travel drive and it works just fine. Another bad thing is that it won't play MPG movies. Maybe the EMODIO can convert,, but I got so fed up with it after an hour of trying I quit. The only other bad things can say about it is that when you play an album in full it still has a quarter second skip between songs. Kind of annoying when listning to techno or floyd where the music never really stops. Now the good. I REALLY LOVE THIS THING! The picture quality is astounding the sound is fantastic and the EQ that comes on it is beyond anything you could expect. The battery life is unreal, I still can not believe I don't have to charge it every day after work,, and I have it on all day. 39 hours straight and it finally quit. Sure the life is shorter with all the bells and whistles on but with just headphones plugged in and the screen off, this thing lasts me three days at work, 9 hours each, it dies on the fourth day. I could go on and on but I won't. As far as I'm concerned, even with the bad program and little bugs that I'm sure will be worked out in time I still recomend this over any ipod or other mp3 player.

[...]. The screen is beautiful, and the audio quality is great. All of the music tweaking ability really puts the user in control of how they want to hear their music. Using DNSe, I have made my MP3's sound amazing! You can change the sound of any track so much that it can become like a new song. You can really punch it up, or make it have a surprisingly live feel. Normally, I don't care to use EQ's and stuff like that, but I do like DNSe!

As for the debated issues, here is what I found after several hours of use and frustration:

Emodio stinks!!! Plain and simple. It is buggy, it is quirky, it crashes.

At the very core of all the reported issues with the P3 is the fact that Emodio does not support many of the file types that the P3 plays! I use Emodio for MP3's, playlists, and a few other things. That's it.

Emodio does not have full support for FLAC or Oog, and will only transcode .avi and DIVX to a lame .svi format. It takes forever, and is worthless. Emodio also asks you to install a large codec pack, and we all know what harm funky codecs can cause. I can confirm that the P3 does have native .avi and divx support- just don't try to use Emodio to get the files onto your device.

I recommend that other users do like I have been:

Use Emodio to organize and tag MP3 files. It easily attaches the album art to the tracks and gets them to the device fairly well. As for anything else, I just do a good old Windows drag and drop to move files onto the P3. I have read that you can set up playlists and synching with WMP 11 (album art will not come across), but I have no need for that.

At the end of the day, the P3 is awesome for playing media- but not anything else. Synching can be difficult. The games and apps are laughable, the software is horrible, and it is nowhere near as slick as an ipod touch. At full price, I don't know why anyone would buy this and not choose to put in a few more dollars for a Zune HD instead- unless you really need that extra file support.

I do love mine, and would recommend it at a sale price- but that is only after I experienced many hours of frustration with Emodio and finally figured out exactly how to use the P3 "my way".

I purchased the P3 to be able to use the bluetooth feature and received way more than I bargained for. I purchased bluetooth stereo headset. My mp3 player, headset and cell phone are all three connected now. I can make phone calls from the mp3 player or my headset. It is phenomenal. I am so glad I waited for it to be released before I purchased a new mp3 player. If it lasts longer and has fewer problems than my old one, I will be a fan for life!

While at first glance the P3 may seem like an ipod touch competitor, this player is actually more similar to the ipod nano. The iPod Touch is multi-function pocket computer -- it does internet/email, sophisticated gaming, etc. However the P3 and Nano are meant to be music vessels -- music oriented devices with limited capacity for extras such as games and video.

I did a little test with a silver 16gb P3, a 16gb 5th gen nano, some Dire Straits songs, and a decent (but not outstanding) pair of Audio-Technica over ear headphones. While the P3 doesn't blow the Nano out of the water as far as sound quality (listening to the same songs at same bit rate back-to-back on each player), there is noticeable difference in sound quality. The P3's sound is rich with space and depth, where the nano sounds slightly duller by comparison.

The nano's sound is quite decent, and I'm not an apple-hater (i love my macbook), but the P3 just sounds better.

I originally disliked the idea of touchscreen interface because the thought of fingerprints all over my screen seemed repulsive. But after actual hands on use I prefer the P3's touchscreen interface to the nano's click wheel. The P3's controls are intuitive and can be done with only one hand. The click wheel on the nano has become located so near the bottom of the player that it can be a bit of a pain to use. That being said, the P3 and its touchscreen is just more fun than the clickwheel. I can live with the fingerprints after all.

My only disappointment with the P3 is the casing material. From the pictures the player looks to have a full metal casing. However, the only actual metal is on the back of the player, the front is actually similarly colored plastic. While, the player still feels solid, this was a surprising discovery. I anticipated the P3 would be about twice as thick as the nano, and that's true. The P3 would be perfect if it were a little thinner.

All in all, if you care about sound quality in a music-oriented player, the P3 is superior to the very good iPod Nano.

Also, the P3 supports drag-and-drop functionality so it works with macs. Before you connect it to the you mac you have to go into the settings on the player and switch the mode from MTP to UMS -- and presto its mac/linux friendly!