At their headquarters in Seoul, Korea, on an all-expenses paid trip, Samsung today gave us some hands on time with their new Serenata phone, which was designed with help from Bang & Olufsen. The last outing from the two companies, the Serene phone, sounded good, but we had some serious issues with the phone's design, in terms of the interface and the hardware. We also found the feature set lacking for such an expensive phone. With the Serenata, Samsung and B&O have fixed some of these issues by taking a more focused approach on music, which is a smart move, considering audiophiles are B&O's best audience.
A focus on music
The Serenata is a music phone with a high-quality built in speaker, but that doesn't begin to tell the story. Like the Serene, it is held upside down, with the screen on the bottom, but the bulbous shape of the Serenata lends itself better to this grip than the previous, parenthetically shaped Serene. The speaker is excellent, perhaps the best speaker we've ever seen at this size. The phone easily filled a medium-sized conference room with smooth jazz, polishing brassy notes on the saxophone and delivering impressive bass. Unfortunately, our Samsung reps were not hip-hop fans, so we couldn't put the bass kick to a real test, but needless to say it is an aspect the companies are bragging about. We could easily see the Serenata replacing a small set of desk speakers, like the kind you might pop your iPod into, though it won't be your primary listening source.
Lingering concerns
The interface on the Serene is largely unchanged. The menu interface is embarrassingly dull. Having spent time with the gorgeous "cross" interface on the Ultra Smart F700, we know that Samsung can do much better. Instead, we saw a blocky font, a dull monochromatic background, and a very basic menu hierarchy. Nothing especially intuitive, and nothing that would pair with the excellent sound from the phone's speaker. When you press the dedicated music key, the phone switches to its player mode, but the music player is as woefully unimpressive as the phone mode. The sound quality is obviously the most important feature, but for a phone this expensive, the interface could be much more elegant, if not dazzling.
The phone now relies on a few areas of touch sensitivity around the screen, in addition to the scroll wheel. We're still skeptical about touch sensitivity, and the Serenata's buttons were not perfectly responsive. The scroll wheel worked great, as it should, since B&O was using scroll wheels before Apple came along and popularized them. And, all around, the phone seems well designed, though it was surprisingly heavy, and it was too thick to carry comfortably in a pair of tight jeans.
But if you can hear the difference . . .
Still, we can't help but feel like this is an improvement. The Serene phone had little focus, and thus came across as a very expensive feature-less phone with excellent sound quality. The Serenata retains the sound quality, but uses it for music as well as calling. We haven't gotten a chance to hook the phone up to our stereo, or even give it a thorough run-through, but we can imagine that audiophiles might enjoy this phone, overlooking some of its shortcomings for best-in-class sound.
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