Samsung Blast for T-Mobile Cell Phone Review - Multimedia
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Mark Brezinski Published on August 30, 2007 Comment on this |
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Accessing Music Software (7.66)
This test attempts to showcase how easy it is to get a song playing on your phone. We begin a timer with the phone in the closed, unlocked position, and stop as soon as our test song begins playing. The Blast was able to do this in 2.61 seconds. This is a quick time for a slider without a dedicated music shortcut button. The truth is, though, many mid-range handsets do have such a button. Still, navigating to the music player on the Blast is by no means a marathon if you know the keypad shortcuts.
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| Samsung Blast | 2.61 | 7.66 |
| Apple iPhone | 3.10 | 6.45 |
| Sanyo Katana DLX | 11.86 | 1.69 |
| Nokia N73 | 4.34 | 4.61 |
| Sprint Upstage | 6.54 | 3.06 |
| Motorola Razr | 12.10 | 1.65 |
Dedicated Music Controls (0.0)
For this section, we score based on how many different buttons are dedicated to controlling the media player. We define a dedicated music control as a button that either only performs music functions, or buttons that, while a song is playing in the background, will perform music functions instead of their normal functions. This would, of course, require a song to be playing in the background in the home screen. The Blast stops music playback as soon as you leave the media player, unfortunately, which is a serious oversight for a modern phone.
The d-pad and select key control the play/pause/stop/skip functions, but they aren't dedicated controls. Also, although the volume rocker controls the media player volume while in the application, this is separate from the phone volume, so even it can't be considered a dedicated music control.
Music Software Functionality and Organization (3.8)
The Blast provides users with a flashy interface over subpar functionality. The interface looks good, and displays the controls you need to control your tunes. The Blast is technically capable of displaying two different visualizations, but they're just short animations that don't appear to be affected by the music in any way. You can do most of the standard operations: play/pause/stop, forward skip, reverse skip, and repeat (current track or all), but no rewinding or fast-forwarding. It does let you create and edit playlists, which is a great feature a lot of phones don't include. Making playlists is a bit difficult, however, since all your music is dumped into one folder and organized by title. There's no way to sort by album or even artist, so you'd better know the names of all your songs.
Online Song Downloading (7.5)
The Blast allows you to download music via the default T-Mobile homepage. The store is a bit more convoluted than other carriers' stores, and we'd recommend using the search functionality rather than attempting to traverse the menus. Songs cost $1.99, or you can purchase a subscription that allows for a six-pack of downloads for $9.99 per month. That's rather expensive: Sprint charges just 99 cents for a song.
Streaming (0.0)
The Blast does not support streaming audio.
Podcast Support (0.0)
The Blast does not support podcasts.
Music Sync with PC (0.0)
If you purchase a USB cable, you can get your Blast to sync up with Window Media Player. As the Blast doesn't come with a USB cable as standard (it'll cost you an extra $24.99), we don't award it points for this functionality.
Music Formats and DRM (2.0)
The Blast was able to play our test AAC and MP3 files, but nothing else. This means you won't be able to play any WMA files or songs that include copy protection on the Blast, so your iTunes and Napster downloads won't play on the Blast. This is a rather disappointing file support roster.
Music Interruption (0.0)
The Blast likes to pretend it has music interruption, but it didn't fool us. When you're playing music and get a call, regardless of whether or not you answer it, your song will restart. The Blast will give you a prompt asking whether or not you want to resume playback. The Blast's definition of "resume playback" means "restart the song," unfortunately. Therefore, if your friend knows you're listening to a song, they can just be a jerk and keep calling to restart your music. Or perhaps that's just our friends. Anyway, a phone with good music interruption functionality would simply fade the music back in from where it was paused so as to not startle you.
Video
Video Software Access (7.43)
This test is meant to approximate how easy it would be to get a video playing on the device. Again, we start with the phone closed and unlocked and end the timer when the video is playing. The Blast was able to do this in 2.69 seconds. This is, again, fast. It's tests like these where the Blast's OS really shines; there was no lag at all, and menus kept up with fast keypad shortcut navigation.
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| Samsung Blast | 2.69 | 7.43 |
| Apple iPhone | 3.20 | 6.25 |
| Sanyo Katana DLX | 8.54 | 2.34 |
| Nokia N73 | 9.74 | 2.05 |
| Sprint Upstage | 10.92 | 1.83 |
| Motorola Razr | 6.30 | 3.17 |
Video Controls (4.0)
The video player is about as bare bones as it can get. You can play/pause/stop a video. You can skip forward or backward among your video clips. You can also control the volume. You can't, however, do anything else. The options menu allows you to do standard operations like move a video to a memory card, or send it in an MMS. You can't even opt to watch your video in a Landscape mode. We definitely would've liked to see additional controls here.
Video Software & Organization (1.0)
Videos are organized exactly how songs are, which means they aren't. Your videos are organized by title alone, and there's nothing you can do to change that. Also, given the limited capabilities described above, how could the software not be simple to use? Developers would have a hard time muddling up an interface that only contains seven input options (and that's counting volume up and down as two separate inputs).
Video Sync with PC (0.0)
Again, without a boxed-in USB cable, we can't award points for video sync.
Video Formats (3.0)
The Blast can handle 3GP files and simple MP4 files. It doesn't support any other formats, like .MOV or .AVI. This is very basic support, and we would've liked to see the Blast handle additional formats.
Video DRM (0.0)
The Blast doesn't recognize any file protected with DRM.
Video Playback Smoothness (6.0)
Our simple MP4 encoded file offered good, smooth, artifact-free playback. Given how poorly the Blast captured video, we were glad to see it at least played them back adequately enough. As for bitrate, we found our test 3GP videos could ramp up to 160 Kbps before the Blast stopped trying to play them. At the highest setting, the video still wasn't very good, which was disappointing given how well the MP4 file looked.
Online Video Downloading (0.0)
The Blast can't download video.
Video Streaming unscored
We don't score video streaming since there is no industry standard for us to compare a particular phone against, nor are there any reliable ways to test video streaming. Regardless, we tried it with several different video streaming sites, and it didn't work with any of them.
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