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GSMArena team, 24 July 2012

Home cinema


Samsung Galaxy Beam review: Home cinema

  • Comments (42)
  • User reviews
  • I8530 Galaxy Beam

7. Gallery and file manager, multimedia players, audio quality
  1. 1. Introduction
  2. 2. Unboxing, 360-degree spin, design and build quality
  3. 3. Display, handling
  4. 4. Projector
  5. 5. User interface, synthetic benchmarks
  6. 6. Phonebook, telephony, messaging
  7. 7. Gallery and file manager, multimedia players, audio quality
  8. 8. Camera, video recording, picture and video comparison
  9. 9. Connectivity, web browser, Samsung hubs
  10. 10. Organizer, Google Maps, Google Play app store
  11. 11. Conclusion
  12.  
  13. Samsung I8530 Galaxy Beam specification
  14. User opinions and reviews
  15. Review comments (42)

Samsung Android Touch UI

Gingerbread gallery and My Files

The Samsung Galaxy Beam uses the standard Android gallery. It automatically locates images and videos no matter where they are stored.

Samsung Galaxy Beam Samsung Galaxy Beam
The standard Android gallery

Little about the Gallery should surprise you. It displays full resolution images and supports double tap and pinch zoom. Sharing images over Bluetooth, email and MMS is enabled, and so is uploading to Picasa or using DLNA to push the image to a compatible TV.

It also gives you the ability to edit photos as well, allowing you to add various photo effects, as well as crop, rotate, zoom and adjust the brightness/contrast and saturation levels.

Samsung Galaxy Beam Samsung Galaxy Beam Samsung Galaxy Beam Samsung Galaxy Beam
The Gallery offers a good amount of editing options as well

The My Files app is a simple to use but efficient file manager. It can move, copy, lock and rename files in bulk, and even send multiple files via Bluetooth. My Files will only browse the memory card and the large internal storage (it can't access the system drive).

Samsung Galaxy Beam Samsung Galaxy Beam Samsung Galaxy Beam
The My Files app

Music player has DNSe, 5.1ch virtualization

The Samsung Beam uses the standard TouchWiz music player. Samsung have enabled equalizer presets (including a custom one) along with the sound-enhancing DNSe technology and 5.1 channel virtualization.

By default, tracks are sorted into four categories - All, Playlists, Albums and Artists. From the settings, you can add or remove categories to set up the music player just the way you like it.

Samsung Galaxy Beam Samsung Galaxy Beam Samsung Galaxy Beam Samsung Galaxy Beam
The music player is great • The DNSe settings • A now-playing interface in the taskbar

The album art has a central place in the Now Playing interface, but you can replace it with an equalizer. You can also skip songs with a sideways swipe. There's an onscreen scrubber, as well as a volume slider.

Another nice feature allows you to quickly look up a song on YouTube or via Google search by tapping on the track title. The handset will prompt you to select whether to look up the artist, the song title or the album and whether you want to do an Internet search, search your music library or YouTube.

Samsung Galaxy Beam Samsung Galaxy Beam
The Now Playing interface

The Music player offers quick shortcuts to play the audio over Bluetooth or DLNA.

In this screen we also found a "Tag" button, which tries to identify the song and automatically fill in any missing ID3 tags (that's info about album, artist, etc.), but in our experience that came back with a negative result all too often. The "Lyrics" option in the settings didn't seem to do anything either.

FM radio with RDS

The Samsung Galaxy Beam is equipped with an FM radio with RDS. The interface is simple - there's a tuning dial and you can save as many as 8 stations as favorites. You can also play on the loudspeaker, but the headset still needs to be plugged in to serve as an antenna.

Samsung Galaxy Beam Samsung Galaxy Beam
The FM radio app

Video player performs well

The player on the Beam can handle the most common video files - MP4, AVI (DivX, XviD) and MKV. The most notable drawback is that it does not have support for 1080p video files, as well as no DTS and AC3 audio support.

While the video player interface itself is fairly simple, it covers the basics. You can adjust the brightness independently of the global setting and you can stream the audio over Bluetooth or use DLNA to play the video on another device.

Samsung Galaxy Beam Samsung Galaxy Beam
The video player is good for everything but 1080p clips

Subtitles in various languages are supported, but you can't load them manually - the video and subtitle files must have the same name. Once loaded, you are able to adjust the text size and subtitle sync.

Audio output is good

The Samsung Galaxy Beam fared well in our audio quality test. The smartphone was nearly perfect with an active external amplifier and quite decent when a pair of headphones was plugged in.

An active external amplifier lets the Galaxy Beam show its full potential and achieve some excellent scores. It's loudness is just above average too, so we have a very solid performance here.

The degradation when headphones come into play consists of a rather big increase in stereo crosstalk, and some extra distortion. We've seen smartphones do better in this scenario, but the Beam isn't too bad either.

And here come the full results so you can see for yourselves:

TestFrequency responseNoise levelDynamic rangeTHDIMD + NoiseStereo crosstalk
Samsung I8530 Galaxy Beam+0.05, -0.14-88.687.60.0110.019-89.1
Samsung I8530 Galaxy Beam (headphones attached)+0.37, -0.08-88.287.30.1020.205-44.4
Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 I8160+0.20, -0.27-88.787.60.00860.018-88.9
Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 I8160 (headphones attached)+0.37, -0.08-88.687.60.0440.221-57.9
Samsung S7500 Galaxy Ace Plus+0.14, -1.30-88.288.10.0100.065-84.1
Samsung S7500 Galaxy Ace Plus (headphones attached)+0.12, -1.12-86.088.10.0180.186-43.1
Samsung S5830 Galaxy Ace+0.11, -0.47-84.986.80.0250.084-82.1
Samsung S5830 Galaxy Ace (headphones attached)+0.82, -0.22-84.586.70.0830.628-42.3
Sony Xperia U+0.03, -0.04-87.387.50.00910.020-87.7
Sony Xperia U (headphones attached)+0.45, -0.10-86.486.60.3930.352-66.5

Samsung I8530 Galaxy Beam
Samsung I8530 Galaxy Beam frequency response

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.

Next Page » 8. Camera, video recording, picture and video comparison
7. Gallery and file manager, multimedia players, audio quality
  1. 1. Introduction
  2. 2. Unboxing, 360-degree spin, design and build quality
  3. 3. Display, handling
  4. 4. Projector
  5. 5. User interface, synthetic benchmarks
  6. 6. Phonebook, telephony, messaging
  7. 7. Gallery and file manager, multimedia players, audio quality
  8. 8. Camera, video recording, picture and video comparison
  9. 9. Connectivity, web browser, Samsung hubs
  10. 10. Organizer, Google Maps, Google Play app store
  11. 11. Conclusion
  12.  
  13. Samsung I8530 Galaxy Beam specification
  14. User opinions and reviews
  15. Review comments (42)

Reviews Samsung Galaxy Beam reviewPage 7
  • Comments (42)
  • User reviews
  • I8530 Galaxy Beam

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