Here is a look at two differ cases from I-Nique: the Tuff-Luv leather case and a standard silicon case. The first leather case is made of genuine leather that is nice and soft to the touch. All of the necessary ports and buttons are exposed and are easily accessible so you don’t ever have to remove the case in order to charge it or operate any of buttons. The top buttons are covered when the flap is down, but I found it pretty easy to individually press each of the top three buttons while the flap was closed.

We have lately been taking a look at many of the new Noreve cases for some of the recent MP3 players. For those unfamiliar, Noreve makes high end leather cases for many electronic gadgets. The selection is quite extensive covering nearly all of the MP3 players featured on this site. Additionally, the product line extends to gaming devices, cameras, and even some netbooks.

The cases get pricey and fall in at the high end of the scale, but from the several Noreve cases I personally own, I feel that the price is warranted. The absence of brand price inflation is subsisted for good materials and quality craftsmanship.

Browsing around the forums I see a few people purchasing screen protectors for their MP3 players that have glass screens. Some might say better safe than sorry but these screens are much more durable than one would think. Below I put a few of these glass screen players though some rather harsh scratch tests, well beyond what the vast majority of users might experience.

Samsung’s last blockbuster was the P2. It was a hot topic in our forum and a player that we put on our Top 5 Players of 2008 list. With that, you can imagine the P3 is a highly anticipated device for current P2 fans and possibly some other-brand owners looking to trade up to a very solid feature set.

For many of the P2 owners, the question is whether the changes made to the P3 make it worth upgrading. The P3 is a substantial improvement on features, build quality, UI, touch, and video playback and is very worthy of the incremental name. I might even call it a “P3.2”

We have been holding out here for quite a while for the P3. The rest of the world (even Canada!) has seen the light of this player but finally the US will see it in May. (Press Release) It will retail for $150(8GB), $200(16GB), and $300(32GB), slightly cheaper than what the S9 is currently selling for.

In addition to the P3 the small flash player the U5 as well as the Q2 will arrive stateside sometime in April. The U5 will sell for a mere $40 for a 2GB and the Q2 will retail for $100/$130 in 8GB and 16GB respectively.

The P3 has been one of my main players for the last few months and has gone though some significantly better firmware updates. With the recent update it has become one of my favorites, even edging out the Cowon S9 by a small margin. Stay tuned for a proper in-depth ABI review of the P3 and in the mean time you can check out some user opinions in the P3 forum.

The US has yet to see the light of the P3 though it has been out for a few months in Korea and is available now in the UK. So we are in a way lucky that we will see a more feature filled and more refined P3. Journal Du Geek is reporting on the change log with the biggest news is native video playback of up to 800x600 resolutions natively. In addition on the video end they have added SMI format support and a mosaic video browser (video) similar to the S9. With this and added DNSe setting for movies.

There are some other small things like a drawing notepad similar to Paint, a Dictionary (only Korean at the moment), and also a new mirror album art now playing screen which does look very cool. More importantly they have increased the performance by 30%. Touch responsiveness was lacking in early versions I used at CES and it improved in the retail version, so this will bring it up to par with the best of the touch screen players.

My initial impressions of the P3 have been very good; however I previously questioned whether it could go head to head with the Cowon S9 since it lacked native video support. But with this soon to come update they will without a doubt be direct competitors. The touch player battle is heating up. Stay tuned to out P3 forum for its release sometime in early March

Samsung's U3 was a decent sized fail and the U4 more or less came and went without anyone noticing. Samsung hasn't given up on stick players, and is back with the U5 - also called DoReMi.

The specs are basically the same as any other stick player out there; 4 line OLED screen, integrated USB plug, 18 hours of battery life and an FM radio. It will come it 2, 4 and 8GB capacities, but no pricing or release date is known at this point.

[ P2 Club via GenerationMP3]

The P2 is pretty hot, hot enough for us to name it as one of the top MP3 players of 2008. Sure enough there is a lot of excitement for the P3. This news all comes at very interesting times when several of the manufactures are jumping into this thin touch screen fray- the Cowon S9 (some cool abi photos) has been recently released and Sony will likely be showing off their touch based player.

This thread in the P3 forums is a nice news roundup of the latest P3 details with lots of links to HD video of the UI and official Korean landing pages for the P3. The only prices we know are the Korean pricing but they look like they will be in line with the Cowon S9. Expect to see the P3 at CES with the official release sometime in mid January.

Every week there is a number of news articles concerning DAPs that don't make it to our front page simply because they are too insignificant for their own article. It can be a delay in release dates, small firmware update etc. To try and get this out to the people as well, here's a news summary of week 48 2008.

GenerationMP3 is reporting that the long awaited S9 will be delayed until early 2009 do to production issues in Korea. Our forums have been buzzing with people wondering when the S9 will finally be out and it seems they have to wait a bit longer still.

The Samsung P3 has showed up at the FCC according to Engadget. This is just a further update on the P3 story as GenerationMP3 already has one and did a first look not too long ago.

iriver is doing their usual weird strategic choices in the DAP industry and have released a new version of the E100. This isn't the E150/E200 that Grahm wrote about in April as according to Akihabara News the only new thing about this model (named E100 Season 2) is new colors. If you recall our E100 review it isn't exactly the best player on the market and i fail to see how a few new colors will change that.

Thanksgiving is on for our American readers and in the wake of that comes black Friday. This also means a lot of deals on MP3 players and related accessories, so join our forums and share the deals to help make sure the players will find a new home.

We knew that foldable screens were in the future of tech, but I didn’t expect it this soon. My jaw dropped when I saw this demo of Samsung’s latest OLED screen fold up on itself. The video demo is of poor quality, but it looks like it’s a very vibrant screen and video continues to play as it folds.

Targeted to mobile phones, it’s a natural assumption that this will be seen sometime in an upcoming Samsung MP3 player. We know the P3 is right around the corner but perhaps this technology will be ready for the P4. But additionally, Samsung’s tech could find itself to other brands, since many of them rely on Samsung for displays. The iriver clix 2 was the first to use their cutting edge AMOLED screen before anyone else. This opens up exciting new possibilities of portable form factors- I hope to check this out first hand at CES this January. Stay tuned.

Check out the video below. [via Reghardware]

It's not a surprise that the Samsung P2 is getting a successor seeing how popular the player is, but so far Samsung has been very quiet. They still are, but GenerationMP3 has gotten their hands on one and has posted a bit of info on it while we wait for the official launch at CES in January.

Size wise it's almost identical to the P2 at 02 x 52.7 x 9.9 mm and 85g, but the player is now aluminum instead of plastic. It has a haptic touch screen, same 3" 272x480 display, Bluetooth and an FM radio. New features include widgets, a mono speaker and capacities ranging from 4 to 32GB. It also ships with some of the enhancement the P2 got rhough firmware updates including support for both Vorbis and FLAC. Battery life is rated at 30 hours for audio and 5 hours for video.

Stop by the Samsung P3 forum, we have some insiders hanging out there answering questions.

Update: GenMP3 has released a photogallery of the new player.

[GenerationMP3]

Since the dawn of man (or at least since the release of the player) P2 users have been craving for a dock for their device. Our forum have been cramped with such threads and although some docks do exist they aren't available everywhere and are more or less Asia only.

Our forum member dirtmonkey took matters into his own hands and went the DIY route to get his dock. His design is simple yet very functional and so far he's made two of these docks and created awe on our forum. Hit the jump for a pictures galore and the creator's own word on the creation process.

It's a (half) well known fact that SanDisk owns a lot of patents concerning flash memory and that this has been the grounds for a lot of lawsuits, arguments and whatnot over the years. Samsung alone has to pay $351 million USD a year to SanDisk in royalties, Samsung being the biggest NAND flash maker in the world. According to a korean news source and half confirmed by a Samsung spokesperson, Samsung is considering buying SanDisk. The plan is in very early stages at best and nothing has been even remotely decided yet, but considering SanDisk's poor results in the last months it might be someone to look out for.

The question is what this will mean for the Sansa players. If Samsung buys SanDisk, the Sansa line would most likely go with it and I don't see Samsung continuing the line if SanDisk gets fully incorporated into Samsung. Samsung doesn't make memory cards at the time being and so it's likely they will keep the SanDisk brand for this, however MP3 players is a different story. At such an early stage of course everything is beyond pure speculation, but if such a merging is happening it might very well mean the end of the Sansa line as it's unlikely that Samsung will compete with itself. It could of course also mean Samsung players with microSD slots, better sound quality and other Sansa features. Again, only hypothesis' but both a scary and an interesting thought at the same time. What do you think the result of such a merge will be?

[The register|MarketWatch] (thanks advcomp2019)

As with so many players these days the info on Samsung's new player is available before it's actually announced. The new player looks like some sort of futuristic T9 and the selling points here are decent capacity and codec support.

The Q1 will have a 2.4" screen and a UI that looks like that of the P2. It will of course do video in form of WMV and some sort of MPEG4. Audio wise it's above average with support for both FLAC and Ogg Vorbis and it will also come with Samsungs DNSe 3.0 sound enhancement technology. One piece of good news for radio fans is that it also features an RDS radio. it will come in 4, 8 and 16GB capacities and be available in pink, silver, white and black. Pricing and release date is still unknown.

[GenerationMP3]

A couple of months ago I did a review of the Samsung U3. Rumors of it's successor has been going around the net for a while now but we now got the first official sign that the player is coming.

That being said, we really don't know anything. A picture of the player has appeared on Samsung's Korean site - yepp.co.kr - but there is still no specs or details. When I first saw the picture I must admit I thought it was another universal remote from Logitech as the design is slightly peculiar. From the looks of it the awful touch buttons that I hated with the U3 are still there though in a new form and the screen seems too small, possible meaning the player is a bit bigger than the U3. We'll see what kinds of specs this thing has when it's all "officially official", but too be honest I'm not too excited about this one.

[GenerationMP3]