Samsung M7600 Beat DJ review: Scratching the beat

Nice finger-optimized galleries

Much like the Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH, the M7600 Beat DJ makes use of two different picture galleries. Accessed from different parts of the menu they are optimized for touch operation and are decently user-friendly.

The first is an inherent part of the file manager and launching it is as simple as opening any folder that contains images.

Once you open a picture to view, you can sweep you fingers across the screen to see the next image without having to return to the image list. Response to sweeps is really great and we do like it more than we did on the Pixon for example. Then again, the capacitive screen might be the reason for this and not some software improvement.

Viewing a single image: going fullscreen, zooming, slideshow

The alternative of the picture gallery is PhotoBrowser. It has a dedicated icon in the main menu and is the quickest way to access your images. As in the Pixon, there is a scroll bar to move through the pictures. Besides that you can choose from three sorting settings - by file name, time and color.

The Photo browser

The galleries also have slideshows and an accelerometer-based browsing feature. It lets you browse pictures in fullscreen landscape mode by simply tilting your phone on its side (plus, of course, you get automatic rotation of the photos by changing the device orientation).

The video player plays them all

The video player is another capable application. It has a nice touch-optimized interface and all the essentials are covered. It can play video files in fullscreen landscape mode (auto-rotated, of course) and you can fast-forward and rewind videos in the same way as the music player.

Video player is touch-friendly

The Samsung M7600 Beat DJ has no problem playing VGA or even 720x480 videos at 30 fps. Not a great surprise but worth noting since compressing videos to view on mobile devices can be a time-consuming business.

The Samsung M7600 has support for DivX and XviD videos. Out of the randomly downloaded videos and movies (including up to D1) we tried, the playback of only one video clip failed, so we guess the M7600 fares better than your average.

Nice 3 megapixel shooter

The Samsung M7600 Beat DJ features a nice 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera. In addition to it there is a LED flash helping in low-light conditions and recording night videos. Unfortunately, as with most LED flashes, its range is hardly more than a meter or two.

Images taken with the camera are a nice surprise - they have enough detail and accurate colors. The noise reduction is a bit aggressive at times, but it's no biggie.

Given our expectation weren't sky-high, the low-range camera does a pretty good enough job.

The overall image quality is more than decent and we are happy with most of the shots. You can take a look the full-size samples below.

Camera samples

The camera interface is nicely touch-optimized and is certainly among the most comfortable camera interfaces on a touchscreen device. The only complaint is that the auto focus settings are not visible in the viewfinder and must be accessed in the menu instead.

The camera snaps quite quickly and is ready for the next photo without much delay. This makes taking photos very enjoyable.

Quite uncomfortably however, previewing the photo you just took is a bit more of a hassle. Pressing the 'play' button launches the gallery and shows you all the photos in it and you have to scroll to the last one taken.

Still camera interface

The Beat DJ is capable of taking photos with a maximum resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels. The videos recorded by the M7600 went up to VGA resolution at 15 fps, which is barely passable.

Camcorder interface

The quality is not really bad - we've seen Nokia 6303 classic bad and Samsung M7600 is noticeably better, however it still doesn't cut it.

Here is a sample video to check out.