Samsung BEATb Preview

Introduction:

Not long ago, Samsung announced the slider BEATs and the candybar BEATb, which are the first two models of the music oriented line “BEAT edition”. It will try to be direct competition of Sony Ericsson’s Walkman series and Nokia’s XpressMusic. In this preview, we’ll discuss Samsung BEATb, which will be a rival to Nokia 5310 XpressMusic.

Same as BEATs, this model is equipped with Samsung’s DNSe DSP and Auto EQ. These technologies are provided in order to enhance the music sound quality. The phone also comes with Shazam’s Find Music track recognition software and the function Motion Play. In contrast to the slider however, here we don’t have the Bang&Olufsen amplifier.

Since we have a prototype, we’ll makepreview instead of a review and will not get into details. Expect ourreview as soon as we get a final unit.

Design:

BEATb’s design is a bit more stylish and not that youthful as of 5310, and we like it. Its size and weight are very close to the rival’s, which makes the Samsung very compact as well.

You can compare the Samsung BEATb with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.



The 2” QVGAdisplaysupports up to 16 million colors and we hope it will be as good as theNokia’. Below it are located the three buttons controlling the musicalplayer and the radio accompanied by the navigational keys and thenumeric keyboard.


On the left are only the volume controls, and the opposite side houses the music player shortcut and the charger slot. The 3.5 mm jack and the strap hole can be found on the top part of the phone and that’s a hint that carrying the device around your neck or in your pocket with plugged in headphones will be convenient enough.


The 2-megapixel camera not accompanied by flash resides on the back of the phone and under the lid, you can find the microSD.

Samsung BEATb 360 Degrees View:

Software:

When we are talking about the software of a non-smartphone by Samsung, there rarely are any huge differences compared to the one of previous models. BEATb is not an exception and you’ll also have menu transition like in Soulb for example. However, the nice theme creating option is not present here. Since BEATb is music-oriented we’ll discuss the music options.




The music player interface has not seen any major changes and only small improvements, related to its options. You can still sort your tunes by a few criteria, but there is a new Music auto off function. As you can guess from its name, it stops the music after a specific period of time (similar to Sleep mode in TVs), but the values are preset. We don’t think this is a very handy function, unless of course, you like falling asleep while listening to music.


Shazam’s Find Music is track recognition software, which works on the same principle as Sony Ericsson’s TrackID. Imagine that you are in a club and you want to know the name of the song the DJ is playing. Start the software and it will record 10 seconds of the tune, send it to a server and get results.

Shake the phone to the left or right and you’ll jump to the previous/next song. This is only one of the functions of Motion Play, because by turning the phone facedown or tapping it, you can pause/play a track or stop the sound, similar to Nokia Arte. These sound very cool but unfortunately, they are not present in our prototype preview unit.