Gadgetory

hey i'm donald bell for cnet.com today giving you a first look at the samsung muse a $60 mp3 player that Samsung is really branding is more of a smartphone accessory they're saying with this and one of their Samsung Galaxy products you can move your mp3s directly off of this phone and onto the mp3 player without having a computer intervene with this and the supplied cable you can connect this to your samsung galaxy note or a galaxy s3 smartphone and move your mp3s directly from the phone and on to the mp3 player the idea being that these phones have gotten so darn big you don't want to take these to the gym or take these on a jog if you just offload the mp3s onto the muse mp3 player you can clip this on put on your headphones go for a jog and enjoy your active lifestyle unfortunately there's a lot of problems with this mp3 player actually it might be the worst design mp3 player I've seen in a while so first off the worst thing off the bat here is the fact that the controls on the front of the mp3 player are absolutely impossible to see impossible to touch is using a capacitive sensor in here which looks really neat because this is perfectly smooth front of the mp3 player but if you're jogging and you're being active and you don't want to actually take time to look at this thing there's no way to actually tell which are the volume controls where the play pause is where the track skip is it's just this entirely ambiguous interface very pretty very smooth but not easy to navigate if without taking the time to look right at it and even when you're looking right at it Samsung puts the interface to sleep after a few seconds so you have to touch it once hold it for a couple seconds and that'll wake up the interface and after you wake it up then you can squint really hard and try to figure out where the track skip and volume controls are and hope that they respond to your touch but otherwise it's really confusing because you're having to do two presses instead of one and even then you're still having to look at the thing to figure out where the heck the controls are so the other controls on here you get the on/off switch that also pushes you into a sound Maximizer mode which has a pretty good job of a little extra base to the otherwise awful earbuds that come in the box then you've got a whole switch on the side which is kind of pointless because it does an automatic hold feature by making the navigation go to sleep after a few seconds but you've got it and then you've got the shuffle switch over here there's a headphone jack at the top which is also the charging jack thanks to a little headphone jack the USB dongle that comes with this thing which you're probably going to lose and then you've got the clip it's a plastic clip does a pretty good job of staying on stuff so you're probably saying Donald I couldn't live with this interface it's really beautiful just show me how to transfer songs off of my smartphone and onto the galaxy muse mp3 player well I'll show you you have to download a free app called muse sync and like the name implies it you know goes through your music library and allows you to connect your muse mp3 player select the songs you want to transfer over and sync them so chemic that into the muse you connect this part into your Android Samsung mp3 player of choice it recognizes that you're connected you select the tracks that you want to transfer over and there it goes it's doing the syncing process it's moving all my mp3's from the smartphone over to the mp3 player so that I don't want to sacrifice my smartphone when I want to go on that marathon let me show you a few other options you have reasons why I would not buy the muse mp3 player first of all say what you will about the iPod shuffle $50 it's a much better built product it's an all metal design and it has buttons you can actually figure out what you're doing just by touching this thing and not looking at it you can figure out just with the ridge of the track skip controls what it's going to do but if you're really looking for a disposable mp3 player that works with anything you really can't do any better than the sandisk sansa clip zip you get the tactile controls you get a built in screen and you get that plastic clip I will say this for Samsung I think they're onto something there is something to be said about a small relatively affordable little companion music player to go with your smartphone I just think that they could have made this go wirelessly would have been really neat if they could have used their Samsung smart transfer or Bluetooth transfer to get your music onto here without having to use a bunch of cables that you're gonna lose I also think that would be really easy for them to revise this and have tactile controls on here so if you're running around you don't have to stare at this thing and do the two touch feature just to wake this thing up and figure out what you're doing so there you go that's a first look at the Samsung muse mp3 player slash smartphone accessory that really isn't worth your time or your money for cnet.com i'm donald bell