Samsung Galaxy Player: How Does it Compare to the iPod Touch?

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For those that already own an Android device, they’ll be familiar with the setup and icons. It’s a touch screen device, and you simply scroll through the many different icons to get to the ones that you want. The major icons are at the bottom: Music, Video, Browser and Home. Since you bought this device as a media player, it makes sense for Samsung to make these icons easy to find.

The device size is comparable to most other media players in the market: 2.13 inches wide by 4.15 inches high by 0.43 inches deep. It only weighs 2.35 grams. The look of the Galaxy is a little old-fashioned. The white border isn’t very attractive, and it gets dirty pretty easily. While it’s not light, it does feel a little plastic.

There’s also another issue with the body of this media player. The screen is only 3.2 inches as opposed to the larger iPod screen (3.5 inches). While a mere 0.3 inches shouldn’t seem like a lot, it is noticeable due to the lower resolution of the screen itself.

Most media players have a resolution between 480 x 800 and 480 x 960 pixels. This Samsung media player, however, only has a resolution of 240 x 400 pixels, and the resolution difference is quite noticeable. The icons and images don’t look as clear as on other players. In fact, you may have trouble reading some text on the player, meaning you’ll either have to do a lot of zooming in, or you’ll have to use another device.

One standout feature, however, is the built-in 2.0 megapixel camera/camcorder. You can’t record video in HD like the iPod, but the camera on this device is usable, especially for social networking sites. You’ll definitely notice the lower-quality images if you blow them up. Most people, however, are only planning on using this camera to capture quick shots and photos of their friends.

The Galaxy 50 has a built-in GPS chip, which allows you to pull up location information. The memory on this device is 16 GB/8GB, but you can add more memory via the microSD card slot. This brings total memory to 32 GB. The microSD card slot is a big advantage over the iPod, which doesn’t have any type of extra memory slot.

Other advantages of this device over the iPod Touch are the FM radio and the removable battery. The latter allows you to carry around an extra battery and change it out when your device is going dead. With the iPod, if the battery dies, you must wait until the battery is recharged before you can use the device again. The battery life is more than decent as well. It plays up to 24 hours of audio or up to 5 hours of video.

You also can use a standard micro-USB device with this player as opposed to the Apple proprietary cable.

Audio and video on the player look and sound decent. That’s not the problem. The problem with the player lies in the operating system. It crashes a lot, especially when you try to launch applications. It sometimes takes up to 15 minutes to get the device working again.

Even if the device does work fine, the player doesn’t have a very fast processor. It takes a while for applications to launch. The lack of a fast processor is also noticeable when trying to play games or surf the Internet. Also, you can use your internal memory for applications; it’s only for the video and music.

Overall, the Samsung Galaxy Player 50 is really trying to be the next iPod Touch. While it does have a lot of nice features, it falls short on some aspects, especially the screen resolution and the functioning of certain aspects of the operating system. What it does have over the iPod, however, is the GPS chip and the microSD card slot.

It is comparable in price, and in some instances it’s actually a little cheaper than the iPod. The image quality is decent, and the audio sounds really good even with the included earphones. If you don’t mind a slightly slower player, the Samsung Galaxy has more good qualities than bad.