Samsung YH-925 MP3 player

Rammed full of useful features.

If added-value bells and whistles are what you're looking for in a portable music player, then Samsung would like to hear from you. The YH-925 not only boasts the usual 20GB of storage, but also has more extras than a Steven Spielberg movie. With everything that's packed on board, we'll forgive its slightly bulky appearance, especially as it's still fairly pleasing to the eye and is solidly built.

Unfortunately, the supplied software isn't so clever and looks very dated. Seriously, we thought we'd travelled back to our teenage years and were making music on an Atari ST again.

While the US version of this product is compatible with the Napster To Go service, the European version isn't. So we uploaded our own music collection instead - a relatively speedy process using the USB 2.0 connection. However, once there, the results were rather disappointing: the player is easy to navigate, but ten hours of battery life just isn't enough any more, and the sound quality is below par compared to the Sony NW-HD5. It's capable of going very, very loud if that's important to you, although this sucks the life out of the already malnourished battery, not to mention damaging your hearing.

All in all, this isn't a bad effort, and in many respects it improves on the YH-920. However, at £250 it's more expensive than both the 20GB iPod and Sony's HD5, and if it were our money, well... we wouldn't end up with this player, that's for sure.