Digital Trends

Samsung Highnote (SPH-M630) October 29th, 2008 | by Stewart Wolpin

Can a phone serve as a workable PMP?

Highnote's primary non-phone function is as an MP3 player. But someone – Sprint, Samsung or both – has severely crippled users’ ability to enjoy this capability. You'd think with the plethora of competing phones, one or both would have figured out how to build a workable player. 

True: Once we figured out how to sync the phone, loading tracks using Windows Media Player was easy.

But when you press the side music key, you are told that Java is booting. (Why you need to know this we don't know.) You are then informed to please wait. And wait. And wait. It takes 40-50 seconds for the player to boot up. Instead of getting your music list as well, you get an interstitial screen with two tabs, one to get access to Sprint's music store and for the actual music player. This combining of the music player and the Sprint music store is a constant source of aggravation. Under the tabs are the last song played, plus All My Music and Create Playlist choices.

Once you select All My Music, you have to wait another 7-10 seconds, depending on how many tracks you have, for all your music to be listed. So however you slice it, you have to wait nearly a minute before you can start listening to your music.

Oddly, you cannot put your collection into shuffle play mode until after a track has started playing either. So instead of just hitting "Play" and getting a song at random, you'll have to choose one to get the shuffle play rolling.

Your song list is not presented in alphabetical order to boot, and we could not figure out how to organize it by track name, if it's even possible. When you get to All My Music, you have tabs that list your tracks by Artist, Genre and Album, but that’s about it. And to switch between each of these tabs takes 7-10 seconds each time. What’s more, you also have to wait for each list to fill before you can move to the next tab listing.

Once music starts playing, the Highnote begins to behave more like a decent MP3 player. But getting there is way too time-consuming. 

Sound Quality

Voices through the ear speaker are thick and muddy, but come through at top volume. On cell-to-cell calls, this quality degradation is supplemented by the usual cellphone warble and intermittent dropouts, although the latter could have been produced by other callers. At the other end of a landline call, we got reports of over-modulated sound to boot.
However, the speaker vastly improved matters. Voice quality was cleaner and clearer through the speaker than the earpiece, if you’d believe.

As for music sound quality through the speaker, it proved excellent, considering we're talking about a cellphone here. Like with voice calls, there's plenty of small room-filling volume, again with the buzz of over-modulation when pushed to its upper limits. But this powerful audio playing capability is especially good for ringtones, which can be clearly heard even when the phone is in a bag or pocket. 

Phone Functionality

Ergonomically, we’re not fond of the small dialpad buttons and the lack of green and red backlighting on the Talk and End keys. Even if you get used to the position of these buttons, having the added visual cue would be nice.

When on a call, you can slide from dialpad exposed to speaker exposed to automatically switch the call to the speaker. Just don't pause in the middle of the slide (phone closed) for too long or you'll hang up the call.

You can call without opening the slide by choosing from your contacts list via the right soft key menu. From the home screen, you can control the ringer volume or turn if off using the voice toggle as well.

Aside from these functions, you can also customize the phone's primary menu. The Highnote's interface isn't based on the usual grid arrangement, however. Instead, menu options are laid out across what Samsung calls a carousel, which is actually a row of menu choices arrayed across the bottom of the screen. Using the navigation array, you can move this "carousel" left or right.

The carousel is pleasing, but what's nicer is that you can customize it by adding (or, in odd cases, deleting) carousel "bubbles," or shortcuts. The process is quite simple and speeds your path to the menu item of your choice. The default "home" bubble also gives you access to a standard menu grid, if you find that easier.