Music lovers who are loath to leave their stereo-sound quality tunes at home can now rock to the music phone by Bang & Olufsen.
The world-renowned audio company has partnered with Samsung to launch a beautifully designed phone, with cutting-edge technology and amazing sound quality, so owners can enjoy their favourite music even on the move.
Jacob Odgaard, managing director of Bang & Olufsen, told
Emirates Business: "It is an extended relationship building on our first mobile phone, Serene. Our aim was to produce the best music phone with the best sound on the market.
"With Serenata, the ambition was to develop and bring to the market a portable player with the world's best sound quality – both for headphone use and for use as a micro music system with a built-in loudspeaker – and this ultimate goal has been achieved."
Serenata features a built-in stereo speaker system that delivers outstanding sound quality. Equipped with a hi-fi speaker and bass system, the phone delivers high-quality sound without any distortion. By means of the integrated loudspeaker system or through the dedicated stereo EarSet 3, an owner can listen to music – even opera – that will make them feel as if they were in the first row of a live performance.
Serenata also handles playback in various formats, including MP3, WMA, and AAC.
Odgaard said: "Combining only top-performing speaker components with ingenious acoustic principles and Bang & Olufsen-patented ICEpower amplification, we get the world's best acoustic performance. ICEpower is a Bang & Olufsen technology that combines extreme high-energy efficiency, ultra compactness and superior sound quality.
"Transferring heat away from the speaker units has been a major problem in loudspeaker construction. While conventional analogue amplifiers convert an average of 10 per cent of their input power to actual output to the speaker units (the remaining 90 per cent is wasted as heat), ICEpower's efficiency is above 90 per cent, thus making it possible to build compact amplifiers with significantly higher output power and cool operation."
Serenata is a pocket-sized phone with an organic rounded design that makes it easy to hold. "Our chief designer David Lewis often walks by the sea near his home. He was fascinated by the shape of the round stones that are washed to shore. They are so wonderful to hold in your hand. Those stones became his inspiration for the Serenata's design," said Odgaard.
Whether standing on its integrated foot or nicely tucked in the palm of your hand, Serenata is an extremely functional phone as its sound quality and design do not compromise ease of use. The click wheel navigation gives users hassle-free control of music functions.
"The basic idea was simplicity and one-hand operation," said Bang & Olufsen chief designer David Lewis. "There are very few actual keys. We use the wheel for all primary operation in the context sensitive menus, like dialling, writing and accessing the music lists. For secondary operation, the wheel is supported by on-screen operation based on sensi-touch technology."
To assist the user throughout, the display changes colour depending on whether it is in phone mode (blue) or music mode (red).
The 2.4-inch colour LCD display allows Serenata to show album covers in sharp resolution and facilitates on-screen navigation.
To enhance usability, Bang & Olufsen has developed BeoPlayer, a simple software that can access and organise all music files on a PC and conveniently transfer them to Serenata. Also through the Samsung PC studio, you can synchronise your contacts, calendar and to-do list from your computer onto Serenata via Microsoft outlook.
The phone also comes with High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA). With 3.5G connectivity, you can enjoy full multimedia features including music and video, e-mail, MMS and instant purchase and download of music tracks.
The phone features a 4 Gigabyte solid-state memory for storing your digital music and data, a portable conference call feature and playback of music without disturbance from incoming calls or messages.
Serenata has been preloaded with music and cover art from ECM, and the Serenatamobile.com microsite also offers a music browser packed with music and cover art additions.
As a dedicated music phone, Serenata also comes with special ring tones that have been made using a triangle, wind chimes, glass and different types of wood.
So if you cannot stand to leave your tunes at home, the Serenata may be sweet music to your ears.
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