Samsung M7600 Beat DJ preview: First look

TouchWiz user interface

The Samsung M7600 Beat DJ comes with the latest implementation of the TouchWiz user interface much like the Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH. Lively, colorful and pleasantly thumbable - the latest reincarnation of the TouchWiz UI has inherited all the virtues of its predecessors and adds some interesting new stuff.

In case you have missed it for some reason, the widgets are basically convenient mini-applications for customizing your home screen. Some of the widgets are more practical such as the calendar or the world clock, even the image gallery or the mp3/radio player, while others are just for fun such as the aforementioned 'quit smoking' and 'go on a diet' widgets.

Traditionally, all the widgets are stored on a bar on the left which you can toggle by using the small arrow in the lower left corner. You can pick which widgets to display by simply dragging them onto the display and placing them where you want. If you want to remove any of them, all you need to do is drag them back to the bar.

The new TouchWiz UI and the main menu

Leaving the homescreen and the new icon graphics aside the Beat DJ unit we had didn't differ much from what we've already seen in other devices.

Now that the the Beat DJ has been announced however, it turns out that Samsung have added a new Disk UI, which makes the music player interface quite a lot like a jukebox.

We'll get a really good look of the novelties at the Samsung booth and we'll report back to you.

The scrollable homescreen • widget options • music player widget

you can still check out some interface screenshots to get an idea of the rest of phone features - messaging, applications, organizer, FM radio.

User interface

Comfortable finger-optimized galleries

Much like in Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH, the Samsung M7600 Beat DJ makes use of two different picture galleries. Accessed from different parts of the menu they are optimized for touch operation and are decently user-friendly. The first is an inherent part of the file manager and accessing it is as simple as opening any folder that contains images.

Once you open a picture to view, you can sweep you fingers across the screen to see the next image without having to return to the image list. The sweeping is really responsive and fluid and we do like it more than we did on the Pixon - just like in S8300. Then again, the capacitive screen might be the reason for this and not some software improvement.

Viewing a single image: going fullscreen, zooming

The alternative to the picture gallery is PhotoBrowser. There is a dedicated icon in the main menu and is the quickest way to access your images. As in the Pixon there is a scroll bar to move through the pictures. Besides that you can choose form three sorting settings - by file name, time and color.

The Photo browser

The galleries also have slideshows and an accelerometer-based browsing feature. It lets you browse pictures in fullscreen landscape mode by simply tilting your phone on its side (plus, of course, you get automatic rotation of the photos by changing the device orientation).

GPS-equipped

In all likelihood, the M7600 Beat DJ will have the built-in GPS chip used for geotagging and some Java applications only, along the lines of Samsung Pixon. There is no navigation software supplied with our test handset, but that may be added later on at an extra cost.

The GPS setting