We've seen a few innovative little touches from the MP3 player market recently, such as the excellent Kensington FX300 speaker case for listening to music without headphones. Samsung has come up with a similar idea with the K5 by integrating a speaker into the MP3 player itself. It's a retractable design that slides away when you're using headphones and slides out to form a speaker/stand when in use.

It's a nice idea, even if it does add some inevitable bulk to the device. Although Samsung has done a fair job of squeezing decent enough sound from the twin channel 0.7W pair, don't expect to host any raves with it. Most people should find it suitable for light listening, the slide movement is smooth and the chrome finish on the speaker grille is in keeping with the stunning design of the unit.

Concerning its abilities as an MP3 player, looks and style are by far the K5's most notable qualities. The main display fades out to black when not in use and is similar in design to Sony's popular A1200. A simple directional pad and menu buttons make up the minimal controls but these are more than adequate to handle what is a fairly limited set of features for playing back your music.

A few simple playback modes and graphic equaliser presets is about your lot in terms of managing tunes. Tracks are organised through the Samsung Media Studio software provided, which looks and behaves very much like iTunes. Despite this software being pretty painless to use, we're staunch believers in the drag-and-drop method for portable players, simply for speed and convenience.

The LCD screen is excellent, displaying your track information and other details in a spectrum of cool blue shades that look seriously classy. In addition to playing MP3s you'll find an FM Radio, photo viewer and alarm built in, all of which are in keeping with the nice design and usability, although the display does seem a little small when browsing pictures.

In an all too familiar scenario the K5 does suffer a little from 'functionality sacrificed for looks' syndrome. Sound quality is pretty good, although this is partly due to a pair of bizarre and rather clunky-looking headphones designed to separate bass and treble for clean listening.

It's a shame, though, there aren't options to manually tune the graphics equalizer or at least offer a few more presets, as you're not given a lot of scope for fine-tuning the sound. But it's worth mentioning that you'll get up to 30 hours of playback from the battery, so a single charge via USB should last you some time.

You'll find niggling problems with the controls, namely when the buttons fade out to black you can't actually see them unless you hold the player an inch away from your eye and squint. This means that if you want to navigate a menu or perform a function when music is playing, you'll have to mash the control area with your thumb to get it to light up, and run the risk of hitting the wrong button.

As mentioned, you're also quite limited in what you can do with your music; although the K5 supports playlists you'll have to set them up from Media Studio first, as this can't be done from the device itself.

Verdict
Despite the drawbacks the K5 is a great looking player that's very nice to use. We'd recommend the 4GB version if you're interested in the benefits of the built-in speaker. If you don't think you'll use this a lot then it's a questionable buy and you'd be better off with something like the Sony A1200 that retains the good looks but gives you more capacity for your money.

Company: Samsung

Contact: 01932 455000

Tags: itunes sony universal serial bus digital audio player kensington liquid crystal display fm broadcasting samsung group