Gadget review : Much more than just music

Let's get this out of the way, the Samsung YP-R0 isn't the flashiest of devices in its class — its class being music and video players — but that may not be a bad thing.

The YP-R0 does everything you would expect it to do, and more. It plays music with support for more formats than you'll need (OGG, WMA, ASF, FLAC, WAV, AAC, blahblahbloo!) and has a built-in FM Tuner too, in case you run through your entire music collection.

That may be hard considering it can store 8GB of media and supports additional storage with a MicroSD memory card. Throw in a few pictures if you want — it lets you store and view them too.

Start putting in video and you may feel the pinch, but only a little bit. Yes, this does support video and a lot of your movies will work without having to make any changes, since it supports a lot of the popular formats (DIVX, XVID and H.264).

However, with a screen size of just 2.6 inches, there isn't a lot of video-watching you will be doing on this. It's best suited for smaller clips and the longer ones are best left to a device with a considerably bigger screen. You can read text files on it too, plain text, that is, but again with a screen that fits around 30 words, don't expect this to replace your books. I told you there wasn't much to get excited about.

The player is light, though, and you'll never feel it in your pocket. The earphones are the funkiest part of the package; they seem to be a hybrid between in-ear style and regular headphones, and provide really good sound for something that ships with the box.

We've all had one of those devices that we wished did a little more and even though you know the experience won't be the best, you're still glad it does.

The feature-driven Samsung YP-R0 is one of those that does go beyond music with decent support for video, pictures, texts, FM and datacasts. If you want a little more flair and style, you may want to look elsewhere but if you're looking for value for money and quality, you can't go wrong with this.

Bhavishya Kanjhan is a digital marketing professional and an early adopter of all things digital. Follow his tweets on @bhavishya