The high-end audiophile's favorite teamed up with Samsung to produce the sleek Serene. Can it's sound quality possibly match its astronomical price tag?
Review summary of the Bang & Olufsen Serene:
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 We saw Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, pull a Serene out of his pocket during a recent video interview, and it made us wonder why he would like it so much. It must have been for the unsurpassed sound quality, or perhaps for the novelty of the phone, because there is little else to recommend the device. The lack of a speakerphone, voice dialing, live searching on the contact list or any customization for the interface are unforgiveable omissions - we've reviewed plenty of phones available for free from carriers that do a fine job with these. If you want a phone with the best quality current networks can manage, the Serene has the audio chops, but there are many, many phones out there that sound almost as good. And those phones actually pack some useful features. Release: November 2006. Price: $1275.
Pros: Superlative sound quality. Cool design, especially the motorized hinge gimmick.
Cons: Lacks even basic features. Unimaginative interface. Click wheel hampers dialing. Difficult to dial and type on circular keypad.
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Full Bang & Olufsen Serene Review:
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When we approached the Bang and Olufsen Serene, we decided to take a different perspective than with most phones. Frequently we are asked by frustrated friends to recommend a phone that makes great calls. Though call quality is always a primary element of our reviewing, on many phones this simply makes up a large piece of an even larger pie. Other features, like e-mail and scheduling on business phones, or multimedia features on 3G phones, are also very important to us. For the most part, the Serene lacks these functions, or includes them only as a rudimentary afterthought. So, for this phone, we focused more on pure sound quality, and began with the question: If you wanted the best sounding phone available, and money was not a concern, is the B&O Serene the phone to buy?
Calling - Very good
The answer is no, but not because there is any problem with call quality on the Serene. In fact, we can easily say that we have never heard a better phone on a cellular network. When we were speaking to a person on a good land-line connection, call quality was excellent. Occasional reception issues gave us some static, but there was no distortion to voices, and little trouble with background noise. With other cell phone users, the Serene simply revealed faults with the other phone's hardware, and listeners reported that our sound was as good as any they had heard. Still, we're not sure that cell phone networks are capable of high quality audio, and even if the Serene represents the pinnacle of cell phone sound, there have been other phones that have managed to reach similar heights, most recently the Palm Treo 755p. We won't debate the $1275 price tag, it would be redundant to question the value of such a luxury phone. Instead, if it costs so much to achieve the goal of perfect sound on a cell phone, we have to wonder whether the goal is worth achieving. We don't think it is, yet, though perhaps improved network technologies, which offer better data throughput, could also be leveraged to improve sound quality. Until then, though, we don't see the point in reaching so far for the best sounding cell phone, when other phones sound as good, and do much more, for a quarter of the price, or less.
From here, the disappointment begins. Dialing with the phone is nearly impossible, not because of the circular keypad, but because of the loose click wheel in the middle. Like on Apple's iPod, the Serene has a wheel in the center (though this one actually turns) that also acts as buttons when you click the four compass points. In fact, B&O has been using a click wheel design even longer than Apple. Unfortunaly, when our finger moved across the circle, say from the "9" key to the "3," we almost always brushed the wheel just enough to jump the cursor, thereby foiling our dialing. This happened almost every time we dialed one-handed. In terms of calling features, the phone has Bluetooth and an address book, and that's it. No voice dialing and no speakerphone. The address book is very simple, and entering contacts with the circular dial is a real chore. There is also no way to synchronize your address book with your desktop's contacts, and if you do decide to peck all of your contacts into the phone, the address book lacks any while-you-type searching, though the clickwheel is a proven tool for scrolling long lists.
Design - Good
The phone's shape is like a trapezoid with gently curving sidewalls. We found holding the phone to be very comfortable with this shape, as the clamshell conformed nicely to our grip. The upside-down orientation, with the screen at the bottom, didn't bother us, though it took a day to get used to holding the wrong end to our ears. When you begin to open or close the phone, a gently whirring motor takes over and finishes the job for you, though in a rush you can open the phone yourself. This was a cool trick, but caused some annoyance, as the phone tried to close on our faces if we pushed the microphone closer to our mouths. Still, opening and closing the device is addictive.
As we mentioned above, the keypad is in need of some serious rethinking. We like the clickwheel idea, but it stymied our dialing too often. And the circular number pad is a serious mistake. Dialing was difficult, and any typing, in SMS messages or the phone's WAP browser, required some serious hunting and pecking. We had trouble browsing with the phone, and suspected it may be a network issue, which brought us to another design flaw. When we tried to swap in our own SIM card, we found the cover to be fastened with a proprietary screw that requires an included screwdriver, which was not included with our review unit.
The phone's interface is bland beyond belief. Using only blue, black and white, it looks clean, but boxy, like a late-80's DOS interface. Menus are easy to navigate with the click wheel, but completely textual, and not remotely appealing. If Bang & Olufsen was going for elegant, they would have been better served letting partner Samsung borrow their in-house interface from recent phones like the Black Carbon.
Odds and ends
The phone includes a WAP browser, SMS messaging capabilities, and a VGA camera. Image quality was not only bad, the camera is placed on the hinge, making framing impossible. We had a very difficult time framing even the simplest snapshot, and when we did, pictures were horrendous. Images had a blurry, run-together quality that made self-portraits seem like Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe silk screens. The phone comes with an attractive, mirrored docking station for charging. While docked, the phone will open itself automatically when it receives an incoming call, which is very cool. Unfortunately, without a speakerphone, you have to pull the phone off the dock to use it.
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