B&O Samsung Serenata

How much did you say?

When you first clamp eyes on Serenata, the bastard music mobile child of Danish style types Bang & Olufsen and the mighty Samsung only one thing comes to mind: iPod. Advertisement Okay, it's upside down, but the theory's still the same. Scroll through tracks using a click wheel, check out album art and stash hefty number of songs. Well, 4-gig's worth. And there's a reason why Apple stuck their wheel beneath the screen. Have it up top and you find your giant thumbs obscure the screen, so you can't really see what you're doing. Quite a major issue if you ask us. But the wheel, which we're told by B&O was their invention way back in 1996, is so much more than a tool for flicking through music. It does everything. There's no buttons for dialling here, just an old school number wheel on screen which is, needless to say, tricky to master. The same goes for texting. Even with predictive text on, we struggled to bash out a message to the rest of Team T3 saying we'd meet them in the pub in ten. See, you need to scroll through each letter using the wheel, meaning it takes an absolute eternity. On the music side of things though, this really is a blower to get excited about. Its got a built in loudspeaker, which doesn't sound give a sound tinnier than a can of baked beans, pleasingly. Mind you that's to be expected from B&O. The interface is dead easy to use, thanks to touchscreen access to the music area and the ubiquitous click wheel. You can use any format going, including AACs, as long as they're non-DRM. However, if you want to use iTunes on your Mac to upload tracks, you'll need a plugin to do so. You can't use MP3s as ring tones, because, we were told, it would 'interfere with the natural style of the phone'. Okay. And then there's the price. �1,000 is a hell of a lot to play for a phone without a camera and is essentially a spiced up jukebox. Still, it looks like nothing else, and that must count for something. Right?