Samsung Beat DJ review

A month back Samsung launched three different mobile phones in the Indian market. Samsung Star, Samsung Star 3G and Samsung Beat DJ.

Among this three Samsung Beat DJ is a music-centric phone. And for this phone the Korean have put a lot of innovations into execution. The Samsung BeatDJ stands out in crowd. Its rounded edges do make it quite an unusual handset. At times you might even wonder which way the handset is up.

The M7603 Samsung Beat DJ body is made of high quality plastic, painted in three different colors. Metallic gloss frames the display and the touch-sensitive scroll up front. Eye-catching violet is used on the sides of the phone.

There are only three buttons on the front surface of the phone. The Call and End keys and the Back button are located at the bottom perfectly matching the design.

Upon a closer look the empty space between the screen and the call buttons reveals its hidden virtue. It's a semicircular touchpad, which mostly gets used in music applications. Together with the touchscreen it forms a circular scroll that stretches from the bottom third of the display to the receiver keys.

However there  is no QWERTY keyboard, just a regular numpad, which is usable enough though.

Leaving the other features let's talk about the main highlight of the phone.  The Samsung Beat DJ has a unique music player. Let's take a look at the Now playing screen. At the top we have three virtual buttons - to turn on Beat DJ, view playlists and access settings. Track lists in both Beat DJ and the music player are displayed similarly and can be scrolled by either the touch-sensitive wheel at the bottom or the volume rocker.

The M7600 Beat DJ has a Bang and Olufsen audio amplifier like a number of Samsung music-centered handsets. As usual, it's got nothing to do with sound quality, but only with power consumption efficiency.
BeatDJ for the fun of it

Beat DJ is the application, which turns your phone into a DJ deck. It can be run from the music menu or directly in the music player.

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.

There are six buttons that grant control over the mixing deck - REC, Scratch, Filters, and Samples. By pressing the REC key you can record a sound file, which will keep all user actions that affect the sound of the played track. Scratch, quite logically, turns the circle into a virtual vinyl, which you can spin on the touchscreen to do scratches.

The BeatDJ also comes with FM Radio which is another addition to its musical strength. There's an option to record radio broadcasts as well, which can be a cheap way to get individual tracks or whole sets off the radio.

The Samsung Beat DJ features a nice 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera and is 3G capable. The phone supports HSDPA up to 7.2Mbps and EDGE for where 3G coverage is not available.

Web surfing with the Samsung M7603 Beat DJ is pretty satisfactory as features a nice web browser - NetFront 3.5. The web browser renders pages well in both portrait and landscape modes.