Samsung X830 review: The small big player

It plays cool

Slowly, we have come close to the culmination of today’s review – the music player. The main Samsung X830 priority is its memory. It disposes of 1 GB internal memory, which is a good achievement for a middle class MP3 player nowadays. Regrettably, there’s no option for expanding it with a memory card.

 
To turn on the player you have to close the cover • list of tracks

The music players is turned on either by a link from the Application menu or by holding the confirmation key, located in the middle of the rotating assembly. No one knows why the cover must be closed when the player is turned on. After that you may operate with the phone as usual and leave the music play in the background. Taking pictures though won’t be possible without the deactivation of the player.

  
Playing • player options

The player’s background is not standard. There is a picture in the centre of all, resembling a rotating key with marked control options. Rotating the control to the left or right changes the tracks; the up and down keys allows access to the context menu. In the menu itself you move by means of the rotating key, the middle button confirms a selection. The side buttons are assigned for controlling the volume level, holding the silver HOLD button locks the player against unwanted presses of any keys.

 
Volume level control • settings

The music player has support for playlists too. Here the pieces are ordered either automatically or manually into few folders according to their character, usage frequency and so on. The player settings include options for repeating or shuffling the tracks, 3D sound and also selecting from nine preset equalizer settings.

Your kind of music

The headset, provided in the retails package is divided into two parts. There is a cable, coming from the phone with a fastening clip, microphone and slot for a jack type connector. There is a call operating button on the microphone. In case you are not in a call, the first press of the button opens the list of last dialed numbers, while the second press – dials the currently selected item.

The second part is the classic headphones. The quality of the retail headset is really very poor and is only good enough for making calls. A good alternative is to connect your personal headphones; the results may be exceptional, because of the high-quality sound of the music player. We tried a comparison with Samsung YP-U2 MP3 player; I noticed only minor differences, which can be softened with a correct setup of the equalizer.

The headphones, provided in the package are not of high quality

The fastest way to store music files into the phone is copying them via data cable. You can use either the PC Studio mode for communication with the software with the same name or the so called MTP mode, Mass Storage is not between the options. MTP mode (Media Transfer Protocol) enables fast transfer of multimedia files to/from Windows applications. Practically it means that for example you may copy music to your phone directly from Windows Media Player. Learn more about MTP protocol at Wikipedia.

I couldn’t manage to open the MTP with Windows Media Player 9. The player was ok, but the copying was running just „imaginary“. As a result, I couldn’t find any of the selected files. According to Wikipedia MTP needs at least Windows Media Player 10. Yet, I can’t explain to myself why the lower player version didn’t notify of any mistake and behaved as if nothing was wrong.

Useful calendar, no Java

The tools for time organization are in the Application menu. The Calendar is right under the music player. It’s very useful even at small display, it offers well-arranged summary of tasks and reminders available to you at a glance. The primary monthly view may be changed to weekly or daily view. There are three types of records – Plan, Anniversary, Tasks – the calendar capacity is up to 100 records for each of them. A very useful tool is the displaying of missed events, offering overview of what you have missed and what you have to carry out in the future.

 
Application menu • calendar • world time • alarm clock

We have already mentioned the Recorder application. It works during the calls too. There are two games under the item Java World. It will take you time to get used to play those games due to the unusual layout of the keypad. Although the menu item is called Java World, the phone does not support additional Java games or applications! Ordinarily Samsung offers three alarm clocks with option to set the wake-up duration and an option to select personal ringtone for pleasant morning waking up.

 
Recorder • calculator • unit converter • stopwatch

The organization features are really generously presented in the phone. Except the already mentioned functions, there are also – World time, Calculator, Unit Converter, Timer, Stopwatch, Check word and Note. Notwithstanding its simple view, the calculator can distinguish prioritized arithmetical operations and works with brackets. The maximum length of one equation is 100 signs.

Smart synchronization

Data transfers are presented mainly by GPRS and EDGE class 10. For close-range communication with another device you may use the wireless Bluetooth, or of course – the provided USB data cable. The WAP browser is also very basic; there aren’t any complex settings in it. It contains history of visited pages, list of favorite links and options for sending them. A big drawback is the display resolution, which is an essential factor in web displaying.

The desktop application Samsung PC Studio is an excellent complement for more comfortable phone management. It allows you to modify the phonebook contacts from the PC, to send easily text messages, to copy files from and to the phone, to set up connection to Internet, to compose multimedia message, to playback multimedia files or to synchronize the phone with the phonebook and contacts in your Outlook.

 
Downloading data from the phone• phonebook management • organizer • a list of data profiles

Synchronization with Outlook is simple without unnecessary and overcomplicated settings, and except for the Tasks, which do not get transferred very accurately, it works great. A similar application for phone management trough PC can be found only in the Windows based smartphones and in Nokia mobiles.

Synchronization and setup options (the program did not manage the bigger font size setup in Windows really well)

The price is of great importance

The contradiction remains alive to the very end. The phone has its pros and cons. Samsung X830 is definitely not the best of a mobile phone. In its case we can rather talk about style for young people and all, who love quality music, who do not mind some extravagance and don’t mind spending some money on it.

Consider well exactly what you want before purchase – just a phone, a MP3 player or a combination of both. The first two variants are easy to get separately and cheaper; if you want a reliable combination of them both, here is the Samsung X830.