Samsung M7600 Beat DJ preview: First look

Superb music player

The unique music player created especially for M7600 will impress you with its simple and attractive interface, and options galore.

The music menu

Let's take a look on the Now playing screen. On the top we have three buttons - turning on the BeatDJ, view the playlist and settings. Both track lists on BeatDJ and the music player have similar view and scrolling between them is available from the virtual scroll wheel at the bottom or the volume rocker.

The music player • rewinding a song • the playlist • the settings

Next line of buttons is the 5.1 virtual surround on/off button, shuffle and repeat. The M7600 has an energy efficient ICEPower audio amplifier by Bang and Olufsen. As usual it's got nothing to do with sound quality, but only with battery efficiency.

The standard music controls are at the bottom - two skip buttons and play/pause. The fast-forward and rewind commands are handled via the touch-sensitive arch that extends over the music keys. It's really fun and amazingly responsive.

You've gotta remember that Samsung have pimped the user experience even more later on in the development of the Beat DJ. So the retail version will have the so-called Disc UI that mimics a jukebox. It looks pretty nice in real, we'll do our best to give you the scoop of the niceties as soon as possible.

Newly named, but well known, the Find Music service is also part of the music player. It's a music recognition service similar to Sony Ericsson TrackID.

BeatDJ rocks the crowd

BeatDJ is the application, which turns your phone into small DJ mixer. It can be run from the music menu or directly through the music player.

We faced a very intuitive and clean interface again. BeatDJ is landscape oriented and its center is taken by a large circle, which takes after a vinyl record. There are no special visualizations here, just the track name, album and running time.

BeatDJ main screen

There are several mixer controls - REC, Scratch, Filters, and Samples. The REC starts recording your tweaks of the music. Scratch, quite logically, turns the circle into a virtual vinyl, which you can spin on the touchscreen to do scratches.

The scratch vinyl

Next up are the 10 filters available for tweaking the music - they include looping, echo, and tempo change to name a few. You can have only two active filters at one time though. If you start a third, the first one is automatically turned off.

Using filters

And finally there are the Samples library - there are 20 preinstalled. Basically this means that while a track is playing you can add some audio sample like a voice, chimes or a siren. When you choose the one you want a small "play" button appears in the center of the vinyl. You can press it as many times as you want.

Using samples

We didn't find a way to add our own samples to the library, but we hope that the retail unit will offer that as well.

For scrolling between the filters and audio samples you use the virtual touch scroll wheel. This, combined with the virtual vinyl really creates a unique interactive user experience.

Scrolling the playlist

The Beat DJ is quite well implemented and fun to use, even in our pre-release unit. The only thing that anyone could possibly miss is a way to mix two separate tracks. But hey, we guess two virtual records onscreen and a fader is just too much to ask.

Have a look at what the Samsung Beat DJ is capable of even at this early stage: