Comes with Android 2.1 Eclair

Out of the box you’ll be confronted with a rather dated Android 2.1 Eclair, overlied with Samsung’s TouchWiz 3.0 interface. If you’ve seen or used a Samsung Android device before, then you’ll be able to recognise the interface. Customisable homepages swipe from left to right, and like any Android device, you can create app widgets, shortcuts and bookmarks. Unfortunately, you’ll be presented with a fixed, non-customisable application bar at the bottom, constantly reminding you where your music, video, browser and applications are.

The Galaxy Player 50 comes preinstalled with a number of applications, including those from the full Google Android suite, so you get Android Market, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Talk, Google Mail, Voice Search and email, calendar and contacts syncing altogether. While some reviewers have pointed out problems with the Galaxy Player 50 resetting itself or even requiring resetting due to errors installing and running applications from the Market, we didn’t run into this issue, instead we saw the device struggle to get into pace with relatively simple apps such as Angry Birds or Tank Hero.

Music Experience

Under the at times sluggish and frustrating interface, you’ll find a music player that is perfectly capable of your day to day music needs. With Samsung’s SoundAlive, you can either leave the audio fine tuning and customisation to automatic or do it yourself to suit your personal needs. The music player, lets you move around a grid to switch the emphasis of how the music sounds. Like many PMP these days, you also get FM radio so you’ll never be bored.

We felt the in-ear headphones that came with the package were above our expectations, adequate at noise reduction (not noise cancelling) and decent for moderate bass with out any struggle or compromise over sound quality. No doubt though, if you have a pair of proper headphones already then don’t bother unboxing these as it will surely enhance your music experience.

GPS

Is it essential to have GPS on a PMP? This is one feature that the iPod Touch lacks and rightly so we’ve only used it twice during our testing. For majority of Android users, the most common app to utilise GPS would be Google Navigation. While there are a number of navigation apps that can now store its map onto your memory (or offer caching), Google’s turn by turn navigation remains to be the single most effective solution. Unfortunately its Google Maps is an outdated version 4.4 which means map caching hadn’t been rolled out yet and we haven’t heard from Samsung on when an official update to the Galaxy Player 50′s firmware may be available – but we suspect there may well not be one due to hardware limitations.

This brings us back to our question, GPS is probably not essential for this device, the only times you’ll be using it is for social networking apps, for checking in on Facebook, geotagging photos, etc. None of which will enhance your productivity but can still be fun.

Conclusion

We’ve highlighted in our brief review some of the features and drawbacks to the Samsung Galaxy Player 50, many of which are hardware associated but some also software related but as a day to day music player, it should suffice. Putting all this into perspective though, if we’re honest, we would pay £30 more for the same capacity iPod Touch for an overall more engaging and satisfying experience.

Pros

• Lightweight
• Removable battery with external memory, supporting up to 32GB
• Easy to use music player
• ‘iTunes-free’, just control your music content by dragging and dropping

Cons

• Low quality build
• Poor display resolution
• Runs an outdated Android 2.1
• Limited hardware performance means you’ll struggle to find any games enjoyable
• Unimpressive camera, lacks flash

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