Samsung YH-999 personal media player

PMC's back, and this time it's smaller!

Despite all of Microsoft's hype about Portable Media Centre, this is only the second device to hit the market using that operating system. In fact, manufacturers have been so slow on the uptake that the concept has risked being stillborn.

It has to be said that the first PMC to hit these shores - Creative's model (T3 104, 3/5) - proved a disappointing start. It was big and bulky, yet low on features. Happily, Samsung has managed to keep this player slim and trim, but it's still too tall and wide to be pocket-friendly.

Like all Portable Media Centres, this one only supports Microsoft's WMV format for movies. If you want to transfer any other type of footage to the player, you first have to convert it using Media Player 10. This sounds easy, but it can take an age - a 650MB DivX movie, for example, took 27 minutes to encode into WMV when we tried it.

Once you've got your video in the right format, you can transfer it to the 20GB hard disk by using the Sync feature in Media Player. As well as videos, the YH-999 can also display JPEG images and play MP3 and WMA music files.

The main strength of PMC is the user interface. No matter whether you want to listen to music or view slide shows of your pictures, everything is just a few button presses away. Video playback is smooth, and while the 3.5-inch screen isn't the best we've seen, it's very watchable. However, the battery life is disappointing, at just three hours for movie-watching.

Overall, this is an improvement on Creative's offering and makes the whole concept of PMC somewhat more palatable, but it can't record video or audio, plus it costs £100 more than the Archos AV400 (T3 104, 4/5), which can.