Samsung BeatBox M3200

Samsung has once again collaborated with Bang & Olufsen ICEpower to bring you the best in audio sound.

Not only do you get a built-in Bang & Olufsen ICE power amplifier in this stylish slider, but you also receive two mini Bang and Olufsen speakers - but don’t let their size fool you. The quality of sound is excellent and they’ll blow you away. The built-in speakers are also top notch and won’t disappoint. One slight disadvantage of the external speakers is that they draw their power from the phone’s battery so it will drain your battery pretty fast.

Other features of the M3200 that music lovers will enjoy are the motion play where you can control playback using the motion recognition feature, as well the built-in FM radio which features RDS technology allowing users to record part of a song and connect to an online database to find out the name of the artist and song. We recorded a few tracks and the FM recording and music recognition worked a treat. We were under the impression that you could only record a few seconds of each song, but were pleasantly surprised to find that we could record an entire track from beginning to end. We’re not sure what this will do to digital rights management, but we’re certainly not complaining.

The screen is a bit small at only 2”, but it has a resolution of 240 x 320 and it is vibrant and clear, which makes browsing the web a bit tiring. Although a redeeming feature is that it is 3G enabled. The M3200 comes fully equipped with the XHTML and WAP 2.0 web browser technologies that also make for a decent browsing experience. Other connectivity options offered include EDGE, GPRS and HSCSD technologies.

The M3200 offers plenty of options to customise it suit your own unique style. You can choose between three themes which compliment the overall design of the phone and change the dialing animations. Users can also select a menu transition effect as well as design the appearance of their home screen. The user interface is not bad and allows for easy navigation and organisation.

The camera is 2megapixels and is a bit of a let down. It doesn’t have autofocus or a flash. Another thing that really irked us was the button layout – there are three dedicated music buttons directly under the screen which might be convenient for music play, but mostly you find yourself pushing them instead of the softkeys. We did however really enjoy the image editor feature which gives the user a whole range of options such as effects (which includes filter; style; warp and partial blur), adjust (which allows you to alter the brightness, contrast and colour), transform (where you can resize, rotate or flip an image) and insert (which allows you to insert frames, images, clip art, emoticons and text). We also really liked the voice recorder application which enables you to record a voice clip and then use it as a ringtone or alarm tone which means you can wake up every morning to the sound of your own voice screaming at you to get out of bed.

We really enjoyed the Samsung M3200 BeatBox edition and believe it will set the benchmark in terms of audio output against which other music phones will be compared.