Samsung M3200 Beat s review: Never miss a beat

Image editing is good

If you wish you can also edit your pictures using the integrated Image Editor - it's a very capable application, especially for a feature phone. It allows you to apply a whole bunch of effects and tweaks.

Transformations and crops, as well as insertion of various items, are also available. All in all, the Samsung M3200 offers you virtually all of the most popular editing capabilities you could possibly use on a cell phone. However, we still doubt it anyone takes image editing on their mobiles seriously, especially on a 2-inch display.

Some of the image editing options on M3200

Music player: enter all the goodies

Samsung M3200 Beat b is a one of the two music-centered phones in the brand new Beat edition of the company, alongside the bar-shaped Samsung M3510 Beat b. A capable music player and some first-time music related features, along with the dedicated music keys, are the major assets of the lineup.

The M3200 Beat flaunts stereo speakers, a Bang&Olufsen ICEpower audio chip, a 3.5mm audio jack, stereo Bluetooth, FM radio with RDS and FM audio recording. The built-in acccelerometer tops that with shake control and turn-to-mute.

By the way a lot has been speculated about the integration of the Bang & Olufsen ICEPower amplifier into the latest Samsung handsets. Some claim it's giving Samsung handsets a definite edge in terms of sound quality. Well, this speculation has been completely disproved by our audio lab tests. All the ICEPower gives Samsung is reduced power consumption, not better audio quality.

The Samsung M3200 Beat takes advantage of Samsung's latest DNSe technology (Digital Natural Sound engine). It's said to produce more pure sound, overcoming the limitations of earphones and small speakers on portable devices. Handsets implementing the DNSe technology should be able to achieve genuine 3D sound and deep bass resonance.

Samsung's alternative to Walkman's Shake control is called Motion Play. It's debuting in the Samsung portfolio after a good deal of implementation in Sony Ericsson Walkman phones. Courtesy of the inbuilt accelerometer, tracks can be jumped or shuffled by a flick of the hand, paused and played by tapping and sound gets muted by turning the phone face down. The same applies to silencing an incoming call.

Motion play is shake control, Etiquette pause stands for turn-to-mute

Another take at Walkman, the Samsung Beat offers mood-based track sorting. We guess it only works after the tracks have been analyzed by some desktop application and then transferred to the handset much like it does for Walkmans. The Moods section in the player didn't work with tracks already on the memory card. Our pre-release unit doesn't have any PC software to it to complete this test.

Mood sorting is available too

Another first in the M3200 Beat is the "Auto EQ" function. It automatically modifies the current equalizer setting to suit the genre of the music currently playing.

The 'Auto EQ' is another first-timer

And finally, the all-Walkman-goodies-or-bust list is complete with a music recognition feature (like TrackID). It's Shazam's 'Find Music' service. By recording and sending a tune to the Shazam server, users can easily retrieve a track's name and artist.

Samsung style TrackID

The latest version of Sony Ericsson TrackID service (found in Sony Ericsson C902 for example) is far more advanced. While Samsung's music recognition displays only the name of the track and the artist, TrackID retrieves the album, and provides a link to all tracks in it. Other interesting TrackID features are "Find similar Music", "Send music info via SMS", "TrackID charts" and a very extensive "Artist info" section.

Retrieving track info with the radio and the music player

That sums up the music player novelties. The rest remains the same compared to latest mid-range Samsung phones. The built-in memory of 72 MB is expandable via the card slot, which can handle microSD cards of up to 8GB full of your favorite music.

The Music player allows filtering tracks by author, album, genre, moods and composer. You can also choose to play either the tracks you've recently listened to, or the ones that you've played the most. If that doesn't seem enough, you can create your own custom playlists.

The other player options are the usual deal

The music player can naturally be minimized to play in the background. The usual equalizer presets and surround options are also available in Samsung M3200 Beat s.

Equalizer presets are called Sound effects • playing a track in the background

There are two extra music player themes beyond the default one, which do not differ a lot in terms of colors and looks.

The three music player themes don't differ much

All in all, we are glad to finally see such a bunch of music goodies in a Samsung handset. The capable music player in the Beat edition is only short of the Walkman 3.0 in terms of interface. The visually elaborate Walkman 3.0 music player has a match for skill, but hardly style.

Samsung have made a name for their cell phone audio quality and we eagerly awaited to test the Beat sound improvements brought by the DNSe technology developed by Samsung. Unfortunately, the pre-release M3200 unit seemed to have some audio output issues so we will leave the audio quality tests for a future tome when a final retail version becomes available.

The Samsung M3200 Beat comes complete with an FM radio. It has the self-tune option to store all stations of clear reception at the moment. There is also RDS that can be switched on and off depending on your taste. The recording option and auto-off features add to the functionality.

The FM radio with RDS, FM recording and auto-off features

The video player is downright basic. It doesn't even support fullscreen or landscape mode, yet fast-forward and rewind are available.

The video player is as simple as it gets