Samsung at its New York City Launch event for its 2011 home entertainment products presented a new line of MP3 players to take on the iPod touch with US versions of the Galaxy S Wi-Fi 5.0 and 4.0. Simply called the Galaxy Player 4″ and 5″ in the country, both run Android 2.2 with the TouchWiz interface and will be upgradable to 2.3 in the future. The four- and five-inch versions both have front (VGA) and rear (3.2-megapixel) cameras and will come with both Skype and Qik for voice and video chat when on Wi-Fi. On the Wireless front they support WiFi (802.11 b/g/n) and Bluetooth 3.0.
They are some of the few pocketable media players to support Flash 10.1 and will have DLNA media sharing. Both are equally rare in having GPS and can work as true stand-alone navigators when using a GPS app with offline maps, including Google Maps 5.
The two ship with 8GB of storage built-in and have microSDHC slots to take up to 32GB more. Samsung is very pround of the fact they don’t need a sync app to load content and will work with drag-and-drop for those comfortable with manually loading their media. They support most common media formats, including the usual AAC, MP3, MPEG-4, H.264 and Windows Media but also DivX, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, and XviD.
Samsung didn’t give a ship date or a price for either Galaxy Player beyond a spring release, though they’re expected to cost much less than a Galaxy S-based phone would off-contract.
