Except among the golden-eared, pride of ownership in a music player rarely extends to the part that vibrates and makes noise. Earbuds are a necessary evil, tolerated only because the player would be useless without them. Anyone interested in good sound tosses the supplied ones for something that sounds better. But if convenience trumps audiophilia in your scale of values, why not toss the whole concept of sticking something in your ears every time you want to listen to music? Isn't there a better way?

Samsung's answer to that question is the K5, a player with built-in speaker. At three-quarters of an inch thick, it's as bulky as three iPod nanos, or one cell phone, though smaller than a pack of cigarettes. Push on the longer side — with practice, you can do it with one hand — and a speaker grille glides into view along two hitherto unseen tracks, presiding over a brightly lit panel.

The display is an OLED — organic light-emitting diode — with status information at left and touchscreen controls at right. OLEDs have a brighter and more seamless look than liquid-crystal displays. An LCD uses backlighting; an OLED is a light source. The attraction, for Samsung, is probably that Apple isn't using them yet.

The iPod forbids dragging-and-dropping in Windows Explorer, forcing users into the iTunes ecosystem. Samsung's Media Studio software enables easy transfer of music, photo, and video files, but you don't have to use it. The player shows up in Windows Explorer, with "Music" and "Pictures" subfolders within a "Media" folder, and you can drag files or even entire folders directly into them, except for the pesky "desktop.ini" file.

At first blush, the speaker sounded tinny and devoid of bass, though when I moved it from my desktop to my lap, away from hard surfaces, it mellowed. There was an obvious overlay of compression with a low-end digital hashy texture, but that let me crank just about anything to the top without distortion becoming too obviously crunchy. With good headphones, the K5 sounded just like an iPod. The supplied earbuds have two drivers and sounded less bad than those supplied with the first-gen iPod nano.

On the 1.7-inch screen, a slide show of my vacation snaps was good low-res fun, with or without music playing. The K5 was a showman, always seeking to ingratiate with flashy graphics, festooning the now-playing screen with dancing EQ bars, and responding to tapped commands with cute little beeps (which can be turned off).

There are downsides. The serious one is battery life. Samsung rates it at 30 hours per charge with earbuds but only 6 with speaker. With the speaker at full tilt, the player beat the spec by two hours — just long enough to torment coworkers for an entire workday.

As for price, this 4-GB player goes for 10 bucks more than Apple (and SanDisk) are charging for 8 GB in a less obese form. Even so, the speaker alone would be worth the premium. Add the bling, very good build quality, and the sheer head-turning originality and the K5 is a great buy. — Al Boline