Sure, new iPods are on the way, but if you just won’t buy Apple, the Samsung R1 is a mighty tempting alternative. Just announced, it’s a new touchscreen PMP chock with media handling skills, as well as one unfortunate gimmick we’d hoped Sammy had given up on: Beat DJ touchscreen mixing and scratching shenanigans.
With the Samsung R1, it looks like the South Korean giant’s done a bit of brainstorming about just what was wrong with its previous iPod-poaching efforts, and made some sensible decisions. There’s now a touchscreen on board, so the 2.6-inch screen takes up the whole slick body, the company’s TouchWiz UI familiar to any Samsung phone users, and DivX support so you can bung video straight on without having to convert it into whatever arbitrary format Samsung’s dice picked this time.
Read our Samsung Beat DJ review here
Slap in 8 or 16GB of storage and a 400×240 screen, and you’ve got a serious rival to the iPod nano in the Samsung R1, even without a camera. It’s just a shame then that Samsung’s elected to stick its nonsense Beat software in there too, so you can scratch and mix samples and even record your own sound effects very badly. Why? It was ludicrous when we tested the Samsung Beat DJ phone, and nothing about this gives up hope that Samsung’s suddenly found a way to turn you into Norman Cook.
Still, Samsung’s pretty sharp on PMP pricing, so if you can ignore the daft Beat player add-on, expect this to come in at great value when the Samsung R1 goes on sale later this month.
