The Beat270 is Samsung's mid-range music phone. The unique part about this phone is its dual-sliding design and stereo speakers below the slider. Along with music, the Beat270 also has a 2 megapixel camera, expandable memory, Bluetooth and GPRS/EDGE connectivity. Let us find out how the phone performs in our tests.

Bundle I'd like to point out that Samsung did not send us all the supplied accessories with the test unit and hence we are unable to show you a snapshot of the entire bundle. Samsung Beat270 Battery Charger Headset Data Cable 1GB microSD card PC Suite CD User's Guide <__PAGETITLE__Bundle __/PAGETITLE__> Design and construction The Samsung Beat270 is a dual-slider handset, a form factor that was pioneered by Nokia with its N95 Smartphone. Unlike the N95, the Beat270 does not have dedicated music keys below the slider. Instead, it houses two powerful stereo speakers underneath. The dimensions of the Samsung Beat270 are 103.2 x 48.2 x 16.9 mm and it weighs 101 gm. On the face of the Beat270 is the 2.2" display and below it is the unique circular navigation key cluster. The navigation keys are surrounded by a circular ring of light that looks really cool in the dark when illuminated.

Sliding the phone up reveals the Call, End, Clear key and the alphanumeric keypad. Sliding the phone down reveals the stereo loudspeakers.

On the right side of the phone is the right loudspeaker grille at the top. Below it is the headset/charger/data cable port, which is protected by a flap. The camera shutter key is at the bottom. <__PAGETITLE__Design and Construction 1 of 2 __/PAGETITLE__>

On the left side we see the lanyard loop holes at the top, the left loudspeaker grille, the volume control keys below and the microSD card (up to 4 GB) slot at the bottom. On the top of the phone is the 3.5mm headphone jack protected by a flap, while the bottom has just the microphone pinhole. On the rear side we see the 2 megapixel camera lens, which is unfortunately completely unprotected and hence vulnerable to fingerprints and scratches. Also, there is no flash or self-portrait mirror. The build quality of the phone is pretty good except for the slider. The slider on our test unit felt quite loose and had a tendency to slide open when not required, such as when slipping the phone in to a pocket. Otherwise there are no complaints from the phone with everything else feeling pretty solid. <__PAGETITLE__Design and Construction 2 of 2 __/PAGETITLE__> Keypad

The navigation keys are arranged in circular rings. The outer ring consists of the two soft keys at the top and the shortcut keys for the FM radio and the Music player at the bottom. The inner ring is actually the phone's 5-way D-Pad. The arrangement comes across as odd initially, but later you tend to get used to it. More importantly the keys are comfortable and are very easy to use. The keys below the slider are in their traditional grid. All the keys have the same size, save for the top row, and are almost flat on the surface. Visually the keypad does not appear very comfortable, however, in my testing I found the keypad quite decent. It's not completely error proof, but after a while you can type pretty fast with almost no errors. Overall I can say that the keypad of the Samsung Beat270 is pretty good, which will be good news for those who intend to do a lot of typing on it. Display and UI The display on the Samsung Beat270 is a 2.2" 176 x 220 pixel TFT. The quality of the display indoors is pretty decent and the colors looked bright and vibrant. But outdoors, the display is washed out almost completely, which make reading text messages difficult. However, the biggest fault with the display is its low resolution; 176 x 220 is just not enough for a phone in this class considering that all the others have QVGA (240 x 320). The Beat270's display lacks the sharpness and clarity of its rivals, like for example the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic.

The interface of the Beat270 is pretty simple and straightforward. On the home screen you see signal strength and the battery meter at the top corners. Below is the date and time. You can select whether to put the operator name at the top or the bottom or to hide it completely. The wallpapers, if of the correct resolution, are displayed full screen.

The main menu consists of 12 icon grid. Each menu item has its sub-menus in vertical lists. The best part abut Samsung menus is that it remembers the last option you selected and when you go back to the menu that particular option is highlighted, so it saves you the effort to manually scroll to that option. You can also have some neat animations between menu changing. The interface speed is pretty fast, however, I did notice some lag when the music player was playing. And considering that the Beat270 is a music phone and a lot of music will obviously be played on it, the menu lag does seem like a cause for the concern. Connectivity, Calling and Messaging The Samsung Beat270 is a Quad band GSM 850/900/1800/1900 phone. It also supports GPRS/EDGE Class 10 however there is no 3G support. The Beat270 also has Bluetooth v2.0 (with A2DP) and USB 2.0 support. The call quality of the phone is very good. There was adequate volume and both the parties heard each other well. The network reception was also pretty strong. The loudspeakers are sufficiently loud to be heard even in a crowd and the vibrator strength is also decent. The Samsung Beat270 supports SMS, MMS as well as Email. The inbox has a 200 message memory. Messaging on the phone is pretty swell, thanks to the decent keypad. Inbox capacity could have been better though. <__PAGETITLE__Keypad, Display, Connectivity __/PAGETITLE__> Multimedia The music playback is the main forte of the Samsung Beat270 and the phone comes well equipped for it. For starters the music player supports MP3, AAC and WMA formats. The music is categorized in to artists, album, genre, podcasts, recently played and most played. The music player also displays album art and lyrics. The sound output is via a proper 3.5mm headphone jack or stereo speakers. There are however no dedicated music keys.

The sound quality of the phone is very good. The mids and highs have good clarity and the bass is tight and punchy, although a bit too tight as the extremely deep bass didn't came out very well. There is no manual equalizer in the Beat270, however there are several presets and they not only alter the frequency response but also the sound itself. For example the 'Stadium' adds echoes in the music as if you are hearing the music in a big open space whereas the 'Surround' option creates a surround sound effect. There are 20 effects in all. They are interesting but no way substitute for the lack of a proper equalizer.

The loudspeakers of the Beat270 are of good quality, however the max volume isn't as loud as I expected. I have heard phones with a single loudspeaker sound similar to the Beat270. A good example is the Nokia 6210 Navigator we recently reviewed. Also, the speakers are too close to each other to deliver proper stereo separation. They also get muffled when the slide is closed (the sound then starts pouring from the grills at the sides but they aren't big enough). Overall I expected more from the loudspeakers, especially in the volume department. It must be noted that for some reason the music player in our test unit did not display album art at all. Also our test unit did not have the much advertised lyrics display option at all. I am assuming that our test unit was either a prototype or did not have a final firmware version and hopefully the retail versions don't have any of these problems. The Samsung Beat270 has an FM radio, which interestingly also has support for recording the FM broadcast. Unfortunately the FM radio sensitivity in our test unit was very poor and it would catch only the strongest of signals that too just outdoors. The FM recording worked well but considering the poor sensitivity of the radio unit I doubt the recording function would be used much. The radio does not support RDS. The camera on the Beat270 is a 2 megapixel CMOS. There is no auto-focus, flash, lens cover or self portrait mirror. The camera comes with a multitude settings such as the resolution, compression, self-timer, multi-shot, white balance, color settings, etc. You can have the camera display guidelines on the viewfinder for guidance (it is believed that placing your subject on the lines or their intersecting points instead of right in the center produces better looking shots).

The quality of the camera is pretty decent. The colors were accurate and image noise was kept under control, even in low-light. However, the images lacked sharpness and detail, which is expected of a fixed focus camera. Still not bad for a music phone, especially considering other music phones in this segment have really poor cameras.

Images and Videos in the phone can be viewed in the phone's file manager. When it comes to images the phone opens images in 2 megapixel resolution and below pretty fast, however 3 megapixel images causes the image viewer to crawl. 5 megapixel and above just fail to open completely. Also, only those images which are captured by the phones can be zoomed or viewed full screen, no such luck with your other images. As for the video player, it can only play videos in the .3gp format in QCIF resolution (176 x 144). Anything higher and you are out of luck. Plus they cannot be viewed full screen. Overall apart from the music playback and the decent camera, the multimedia aspect of the Samsung Beat270 is pretty disappointing. <__PAGETITLE__Multimedia __/PAGETITLE__> Web Browsing Web browsing has become an integral part of all phones now and is also one of the most used features. It has become a must for mobile phones to include a decent web browser built-in to ensure that for times when you are outdoors with no access to PC and there is a need to urgently access the net, your phone should come to your aid. The built-in browser in the Samsung Beat270 is the typical OpenWave found in most Samsung non-Smartphones (although some of the newer ones have Access NetFront). This browser is only good for opening and viewing mobile sites as it cannot deal with full blown web sites. Even with just mobile sites the browser feels a bit laggy.

To improve the web browsing experience a bit, I installed the Opera Mini browser which is a free Java based browser which can be installed on nearly any Java phone with GPRS connectivity. The Mini definitely does a better job and also consumes less data. The Mini also demonstrated that the B270's Java performance is up to the mark, should you feel the need to install additional applications and games. Battery performance The Samsung Beat270 comes with a 960 mAh Li-Ion battery. The company claims a stand-by time of 330 hours and a talk-time of 9 hours and 30 minutes. However in our testing the phone struggled to last for one entire day, with a few calls, 5-6 hours of music listening with headphones, 1 hour with loudspeaker, 2 hours of GPRS usage and few file transfers over Bluetooth. It could be attributed to just our review unit, which definitely wasn't in the pink of its health; however that cannot be said for sure. We wished Samsung would provide us with better review samples in the future. As it stands now, the battery life of the Beat270 is definitely not impressive. Conclusion The performance of the Samsung Beat270 is a mixed bag. The good things are its looks, the audio quality, the comfortable keypad and a decent camera. The bad things are its display resolution and poor battery life. Overall, had it not been for the lack of dedicated music keys and the poor battery life, the Beat270 would have been a great music phone. Unfortunately that is not the case. I would rather suggest you take a look at either the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic which sell for a similar price but is better for music playback. However, as an all-round package the Samsung Beat270 is worth a look. The Samsung Beat270 sells for Rs. 9,500. Test unit sourced from Media Magic <__PAGETITLE__Browsing, Battery, Conclusion __/PAGETITLE__>