Verizon Wireless' new music phone gets a boost from Bang & Olufsen. Does that mean high-end sound, or just high-end branding? Find out in our Samsung Trance review.
Review summary of the Samsung Trance:
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 The Samsung Trance proves that, once again, branding can't save a mediocre product, and also that Bang & Olufsen should probably stay away from the phone market. This isn't a bad music phone, and it does have a few nice features like a 3.5mm headphone jack, 1GB of onboard memory and the ability to send music to 2 stereo Bluetooth devices at once. But seriously, if Samsung and B&O can't nail the sound quality, why bother branding the phone a B&O ICEpower device? In our listening tests, the Samsung Trance failed to wow us. The music player was also too confusing to use regularly, with inconsistent navigation and a lack of playback control on the home screen. For the same price, the Sony Ericsson W760a on AT&T is a much better choice, or stick with Verizon and spend a few bucks more to pick up the LG Chocolate 3. Both have good music options, and better features all around. Release: May 2009. Price: $50.
Pros: Sleek design with contoured ribs for easy sliding. Good GPS performance. Nice set of musical features.
Cons: Bang & Olufsen ICEpower sound fails to impress. Music experience overall is muddy and sub-par. Interface needs an update.
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Full Samsung Trance Review:
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Design – Good
The Samsung Trance is a slick looking slider, with a design clearly influenced by musical instruments. Our review unit was the piano black color, with its glossy paint on the device's face. The upper slide has curved ribs, reminiscent of a string instrument like a violin. These actually helped us open the phone easily. Closed, with the touch sensitive buttons hidden, the phone looks more like a simple MP3 player; a clean black slab with a bright, colorful display up top.
Overall, we liked the design, but the touch buttons on the Samsung Trance's face didn't shine. The haptic feedback helps a little, and to Samsung's credit the buttons were plenty sensitive. But they just didn't have the response we needed, and we always dreaded using the buttons to excess: when we were browsing our music library, for instance. Real buttons would have been better, but a jog wheel or something faster would have been a real coup.
The interface design is bland, a disappointment for this music-centric device. Besides the music player, the rest of the phone is pure Verizon Wireless fare. Samsung wisely brings the best features, like music and navigation, to the main menu, but other apps, like the Web browser, are buried under layers of repetitive and redundant menus. There are two menus that access e-mail, for instance, and another two that will lead to the music player. Time to consolidate, we think.
Calling – Very Good
Call quality on the Samsung Trance was very good. The phone had a nice, clean sound during calls. Occasionally, during loud moments of conversation, we heard some distortion, but this was never disturbing. For reception, the phone lagged a bit, and we averaged about 3 out of 5 bars on Verizon Wireless' 1xRTT network. Battery life was pretty good. We managed a call that lasted more than 5 hours, about a half hour more than Samsung's estimates. More importantly, the Trance can play music all night long, and we let the player play for more than 18 hours before we stopped the tunes.
The Samsung Trance has a surprisingly robust contact list. It can only show a couple fields onscreen at once, but there's room for plenty of information from each contact. For other calling features, we were surprised by the lack of volume and sound quality on the speakerphone. We'll talk more about the Bang & Olufsen ICEpower technology in the music section, but suffice to say we were expecting much more from a phone with such provenance. The Samsung Trance did impress us with accurate, speaker-independent voice dialing, though. Conference calling was easy to connect once we figured it out. Just press the Talk key to connect a second call. Too bad the phone didn't offer any visual feedback or guidance for this, and the feature is surprisingly left out of the user manual.
Messaging - Good
Messaging on the Samsung Trance is simple, but effective. The phone features text and picture messaging, as well as e-mail support for a number of clients. Gmail wasn't in the preset list, but the phone let us enter our e-mail address, and we were browsing our Gmail inbox within seconds. Instant messaging doesn't come preloaded, but there is an app available for download in the labyrinth of Verizon Wireless' download menus. It's a simple app to connect with AOL, MSN and Yahoo, but it does the trick if IM chatting is your thing. The keyboard on the Samsung Trance was a bit small, but the keys have ridges on all sides, and this helped our fingers find their target.
Music - Good
We were one of the few sites to review the Bang & Olufsen Serene phone, and we've been following the Samsung / B&O partnership with interest for the last few years. The Samsung Trance is not a true B&O phone, but it does proclaim its "Audio by Bang & Olufsen ICEpower" heritage on the back, right under the protruding speaker. Frankly, after taking a long listen to the Trance, we're thinking that Bang & Olufsen might as well stay out of the phone business altogether, because the music experience on the phone ranged from better-than-average to downright frustrating.
For audio quality, we tested the phone using a variety of music. In our first few tests with some middle of the road alternative music, Coldplay and the like, the Samsung Trance sounded pretty good. The music was clean and rich, with some nuances missing on the latter device. When we tried some more difficult and dynamic tracks, some remixes from Nine Inch Nails and some Hip-Hop from Mos Def, the Trance fell apart.
The phone had difficulty staging the music, so every sound seemed to come from somewhere near the center. The so-called 3D Surround feature provided nothing of the sort, and neither did stereo widening help the sound much. We played with the EQ a bit, and this definitely enhanced the sound, but it still couldn't match the dynamic range and intensity of for instance the Apple iPhone. The Trance also fell behind in a few other ways. The phone couldn't drive our headphone with enough power to produce the ear-splitting volume we require for Nine Inch Nails. We also had high hopes for the speaker, but it too was a disappointment. Music still sounded small and tinny coming from the back of the phone.
The music player itself was just as disappointing, if not more so. The player was a confusing mess, and we often found ourselves accidentally closing the player window or the library list and returning to the phone's home screen. The back key, it seems, doesn't really mean 'back' for this app. Once we were on the homescreen, we could see which song was playing, but we couldn't really control the music without navigating back to the now playing window. Samsung gives you a button to "Play" a song that is already playing, but apparently "Pause" is out of the question. On a related note, if you happen to yank the headphones while the music is in progress, the Trance will happily start blasting your tunes from the speaker. With no easy way to stop the music quickly, this could have disastrous results when you need to keep things quiet.
There are a few upsides to the music playback. The phone comes with 1GB of onboard storage, which is a good start, and it can recognize microSDHC cards up to 16GB capacity. Samsung includes a clever USB cable / charger combo, and though we wish every time that the company would break down and just use miniUSB like everyone else, at least this combo cord cuts down on the amount of junk you have to take on the road. The phone is also capable of a neat trick with Bluetooth. To share music, you can pair the Samsung Trance with up to 2 stereo Bluetooth devices. So, if you happen to know 2 people who own stereo Bluetooth headsets, you can share the music on the go without a headphone splitter.
Web, Camera and Navigation – Mediocre
The Samsung Trance runs on Verizon Wireless' older, slower 1xRTT network, which provides network speeds similar to a dial-up modem. This means that the phone lacks Verizon's V Cast services, including the V Cast music store. That's a surprising omission for this phone that wears its musical badge on its sleeve. This also means that Web browsing isn't an impressive feature on the Trance. The phone has a simple WAP browser, but the Access Netfront browser choked on more complicated pages, like our own homepage.
For GPS navigation, the Samsung Trance did a nice job, and we hardly noticed the lack of network power. The phone found us fairly quickly, and maps loaded just in time to guide us, turn-by-turn, on our trek through the 'burbs. The Trance even gets an advanced version of VZ Navigator. On this device, VZ Navigator can recognize spoken input, so you can search for local business or input addresses by holding the Talk key and speaking into the mic. It's a slow process, as the phone uploads audio to a server for transcription, but it worked nicely in our tests, and made navigation a bit easier on the road.
The camera on the Samsung Trance is a 1.3-megapixel shooter, coming in at the low end on today's cameraphone scale. Despite the low resolution (or perhaps because of it), pictures on the Trance looked just fine. The low resolution doesn't afford much detail, but color looked okay, and shots were overall fairly pleasant. They wouldn't make good desktop wallpapers, but for anything smaller, say mobile uploads or basic cameraphone pics, they'll do the trick. Check out our image samples below.
Flowers and bee
Self portrait
Barbed Wire
Price and availability
The Samsung Trance is available now from Verizon Wireless for $50 with a contract agreement.
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