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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.
After a little toggling back and forth between the MusicMatch Help screens and the Sprint PCS/Samsung Uproar user’s guide, I built my MP3 playlist and prepared to download it into the phone’s 64MB memory.
A USB cable connects to the phone, via its data port, to the PC—Windows only, sorry Mac fans. (I surely will lose the slim rubber protector, which must be pulled off the data port to connect the cable.)
The MusicMatch software contains the Uproar device driver, so once I had built a playlist of MP3 files, I selected “Send to Device” and “Download playlist to Samsung Uproar” under the MusicMatch Options menu. The 11-title, 55MB playlist took about 30 seconds to fully load into the upload software.
I hit “Select All,” then “Send,” then waited about four to five minutes for all 55MB to download to the phone. Text messages on the phone’s LCD apprised me of the phone’s status throughout the connection and transfer.
After the phone is disconnected from the PC, I can scroll through the playlist, using either the phone’s keypad or the stereo headset remote to control the MP3 player functions.
The Uproar does not tax its own batteries while connected to the PC, so downloading or manipulating MP3 files does not drain the phone’s lithium ion battery.
Samsung did not bundle any form of PC synchronization for PIM data with its $400 Uproar. You can buy OpenWave’s FoneSync Pro for PC help with maintaining phone lists, but it won’t synch the phone with PC calendar data.
Still, Samsung’s attention to ease-of-use isues—effective, pleasing alert tones; the ability to turn a “Call Alert” option on or off while listening to music; an energy smart power-setup—tells you that Samsung took care building this combo device. That care pays off and lets you enjoy the music, without worrying about compromising your phone.
www.samsung.com
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