Samsung MP3 Cell Phone (includes Live Simulation)
July 2001
Uproar: Music without Madness
by Janet Pinkerton
I'm rocking out to "She's the One for Me" by The Beta Band on the Samsung Uproar, a $400 digital mobile phone/MP3 player.
The handset's in my pants pocket, the earbuds in my ear, the wired remote clipped to my t-shirt. My PSP (personal snagging potential—on the arms of my office chair, on doorknobs, on office debris) is very high. Still, I am rocking out.
As an MP3 player, the Uproar's sound quality is excellent—whether it be Led Zeppelin or Stereolab, at high or low volumes. The earbuds don't fit my ears, but the music sounds great. The on-screen menu's easy to understand, the batteries aren't dead yet and, best of all, the road I took to get here was fairly idiot-proof.
Whoops! A series of subtle bleeps—aggressive enough to get my attention, but not enough to jangle my nerves—just interrupted the music (Stereolab's "Fiery Yellow"). A similar alert notifies you of incoming calls. I pull the handset out of my pocket to read "call heigi" on the phone's display.
"heigi" is Heidi, my brother's girlfriend. (I have not yet mastered Tegic's T9 predictive text input system.) I programmed the Uproar to remind me to call Heidi so we can get together for drinks and dish the dirt on my bro. I am now reminded.
As I was saying, the road to rocking out on the Uproar is idiot-proof. Sprint PCS, Samsung and MusicMatch did a great job creating a CD of accompanying software that launches upon insertion into a computer drive and walks you through the process of ripping MP3 files and loading them onto your Uproar. All MP3 instructions are bound into the Uproar's user guide—another plus.
The CD walked me through the installation of MusicMatch and, once installed, MusicMatch prompted me to connect to the Internet to access CDDB's disk recognition service. The database supplied all of the title/track information for the CDs I borrowed from our new managing editor Chris Jagger. As I ripped the CDs, the CDDB database and MusicMatch software tagged the MP3 files with title/artist information that will be loaded onto the phone.
by Janet Pinkerton
I'm rocking out to "She's the One for Me" by The Beta Band on the Samsung Uproar, a $400 digital mobile phone/MP3 player.
The handset's in my pants pocket, the earbuds in my ear, the wired remote clipped to my t-shirt. My PSP (personal snagging potential—on the arms of my office chair, on doorknobs, on office debris) is very high. Still, I am rocking out.
As an MP3 player, the Uproar's sound quality is excellent—whether it be Led Zeppelin or Stereolab, at high or low volumes. The earbuds don't fit my ears, but the music sounds great. The on-screen menu's easy to understand, the batteries aren't dead yet and, best of all, the road I took to get here was fairly idiot-proof.
Whoops! A series of subtle bleeps—aggressive enough to get my attention, but not enough to jangle my nerves—just interrupted the music (Stereolab's "Fiery Yellow"). A similar alert notifies you of incoming calls. I pull the handset out of my pocket to read "call heigi" on the phone's display.
"heigi" is Heidi, my brother's girlfriend. (I have not yet mastered Tegic's T9 predictive text input system.) I programmed the Uproar to remind me to call Heidi so we can get together for drinks and dish the dirt on my bro. I am now reminded.
As I was saying, the road to rocking out on the Uproar is idiot-proof. Sprint PCS, Samsung and MusicMatch did a great job creating a CD of accompanying software that launches upon insertion into a computer drive and walks you through the process of ripping MP3 files and loading them onto your Uproar. All MP3 instructions are bound into the Uproar's user guide—another plus.
The CD walked me through the installation of MusicMatch and, once installed, MusicMatch prompted me to connect to the Internet to access CDDB's disk recognition service. The database supplied all of the title/track information for the CDs I borrowed from our new managing editor Chris Jagger. As I ripped the CDs, the CDDB database and MusicMatch software tagged the MP3 files with title/artist information that will be loaded onto the phone.
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