Be it television or disc (CD, DVD, Blu-ray) players and a lot of other products, Samsung has always been one such player in the market that has tried to in corporate the latest of technology in their products. The fact that Samsung was one of the very few companies who supported the Blu-ray format since its inception proves the point. It is the same case with the portable players. Samsung has lived upto its reputation, as they come up with portable players that include more and more features every time. Loaded with a few features more is the Samsung P2.

Samsung this time, seems to have understood the need of the hour and exactly what the consumers want. Style and utility in the same package, that's what you get in P2. The black piece we received was style and sleekness personified. No cluster of tactile buttons anywhere (except for the 'On'I'Off' and 'Hold' buttons on the side), which results in a bigger screen. The only hiccup was that the black finish easily picked up our fingerprints. So if you are fussy enough then it would lead to an addition of 100 bucks in the total deal (for gloves which you will have to pick up).

We have already let out the secret that the P2 does not have any tactile buttons, which means that P2 comes with a touchscreen. You may ask, "what is so great?", as a lot of other players come with touchscreens too. A valid query, but what most of these other players lack is the sensitivity and speed of the touchscreen. Especially when the players have an animated

GUI (Graphical User Interface). each time you touch a button it becomes really difficult to wait for the animation to get over before you can proceed to the next step. Well that won't be a problem here as the animation stops as soon as you touch the screen to move on. One more advantage is the relative bigger screen. What's worth mentioning is the Bluetooth that enables you to hook the P2 to any Bluetooth enabled device to use the P2 either as the source or the receiver.

With P2 as the source, you can couple it with a Bluetooth activated headset, while as the receiver you can connect the P2 to a mobile phone and use the P2's inbuilt microphone or alternate with its headphones. Just like a lot of other players from samsung, the P2 also comes with 4GB and BGB storage options along with other features like the FM radio, voice recording, text compatibility. Also the P2 works with the samsung Media software just as any other media player from samsung.

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Installing the software and getting all the stuff on the P2 did not take more than 15 minutes to be precise (or may be we just got faster at it). Finally we come down to how this attractive member of the Sam sung family performs. Until then, we were all geared up to get a taste of it. The album is an excellent example of good old analogue recording style where music director MM Kreem has pulled out a lot of acoustic instruments (especially traditional folk instruments) from his attic and blended them with rich Rajasthani melodies.

The P2 did complete justice to the recording engineers' skills as it rendered the compositions almost as they were supposed to be. The mid-bass had immaculate clarity, running into the lower end bass. The highs were sparkling and crisp with no harshness. We were running the P2 on the default EQ mode. For those who want their music to be in a specific style there are a number of preset EQ settings like classical, jazz, etc.

The only hitch we (actually our ears) noticed was that as we enjoyed the P2 for a couple of hours, the headphones took its toll on our ears. Maybe a third party headphone of your choice can be of help. With no pixelation and response lag, the video was also a treat. The bigger screen just took the experience a notch higher (as small screens really don't do any good to the purpose of video playback). However the photo playback could have been a little better. The screen was bright and displayed almost all the colours except for the fact that the images were stretched; the aspect ratio is not rendered accurately.