No matter what some people say, there was nothing grammatically wrong with Apple's slogan, “Think different.” It wasn't telling you how to think — it was telling you what to think about. Think “Think big,” “Think thin,” or (as a skier's bumper sticker puts it) “Think snow.”
In any case, thinking different — or differently, if you insist — was a big part of the iPod's success. Its rivals, however, never took that motto to heart. For four years, they've designed their pocket music players to be as much like the iPod as possible. “We'll get rich,” electronics executives seemed to think. “We'll sell a player that's just like the iPod — except it'll be ours.”
It didn't work. All of the iPod's competitors put together have made only a small dent in its dominance. When will it occur to someone to fight innovation with innovation — to think different?
Samsung's new YP-K5 adopts just this strategy. It's a music player, all right, of the Microsoft (Windows-only) persuasion. That is, it can't play songs from Apple's on-line iTunes Store, but it does play songs you buy from any of the PlaysForSure on-line stores like Rhapsody, Napster or Yahoo! Music. (You can buy songs for $1 each from such stores, or rent as many songs as you like for a flat monthly fee of $15 or so; when you stop paying, you lose your entire collection.)
The K5 costs $210 for a model with 2 gigabytes of memory (about 500 songs' worth) or $260 for a 4-gig model. That's roughly $50 more each than the corresponding iPod Nano models. Is Samsung out of its mind?
No, because the K5 has a very big ace up its sleeve: built-in speakers.
Held in your hand, the K5 looks like a black triple-thick iPod Nano (3.8 by 1.8 by 0.7 inches). It turns out, though, that it's that thick for a reason: what looks like a shiny black slab is actually two slabs, ingeniously connected by a sliding hinge. When you push against the edge, the halves slip apart; the previously concealed bottom half reveals a silver speaker grille. At this moment, the K5's screen image rotates 90 degrees, so that the display is upright when you set the whole thing down on a desk or table.
In that position, it looks like a cross between a teeny tiny laptop and an itty bitty boom box.
Because that's what it is right now: a boom box. Yank the headphone cord out, and now your music plays through these tiny speakers. The sound quality from the two 1-inch speaker cones will not exactly make you think you're sitting in Carnegie Hall. The bass, for example, wouldn't shake the rafters of a dollhouse.
Even so, these are the best 1-inch speakers you've ever heard — much better than, say, the music-playing cell phones that pass for audio equipment these days. There's enough power to fill a room with background music, for example.
Now, you might wonder about this idea of adding speakers to an MP3 player. Isn't the whole iPod concept based on having a private sound bubble, playing your own personal music collection?
But that's just the point: the K5 does not, in fact, share the iPod concept. It becomes something very different, a machine that tweaks the definition of the MP3 player.
The more you live with the K5, the more convenient you find those speakers. They're great when you want your friends to hear a favorite new song, of course. But it's also nice to set the thing down while you and someone (or several someones) are working together: cleaning out the garage, cooking dinner or driving down the road. Most radically, you can even have a conversation as the music plays. (Try that with earbuds on!)
The menu system (Albums, Artists, Tracks and so on) and basic circular four-button will seem familiar to iPod fans. But on the K5, there are no physical buttons at all. The controls instead are blue, glowing touch-sensitive patches on the otherwise glossy, glassy, perfectly flat front panel. Along with the main menu, with icons that visibly morph from one to the next as you scroll through them, these illuminated buttons give the K5 a very cool, futuristic vibe.
