Samsung S5620 Monte review: Well connected

Music player rocks with DNSe

Along with the standard 3.5 mm audio jack and the microSD card slot, the S5620 music functionality is complemented by the great music player usually found on Samsung devices.

The album art takes the entire top half of the music player with the basic controls underneath it.

Tapping on the album art overlays additional controls - the progress indicator, a button to change the repeat mode, a shuffle button and an equalizer preset button.

The music player allows filtering tracks by author, album, and genre. Automatic playlists (recently added, most played etc.) are also generated and can subsequently be used as filters. If that doesn't seem enough, you can create your own custom playlists.

The music player can naturally be minimized to play in the background.

The music player is up to scratch

The S5620 Monte equalizer offers the standard presets like pop, jazz, classic, as well as widening, dynamic and surround effects. You can’t create custom equalizers, but with such a wide selection of presets you really won’t need to.

The DNSe sound enhancing technology offers Externalization, Music clarity, Bass enhancement, Mega bass, Wide and Concert hall presets for an even better sonic experience.

The DNSe sound effects • the music player widget

The Find music service is a tap away and can be used to identify music playing from somewhere else, e.g. at the café, by sampling about 10 seconds from it and looking it up on web servers.

The Find music app works great

Radio finds music, records it too

The Samsung S5620 Monte features an FM radio with RDS. The radio app works with Find Music too, which is great if you missed the name of the song playing on the radio.

The FM radio application o the radio and player widgets

There's an option to record radio broadcasts as well, which can be a cheapo way to get individual tracks or whole song sets off the radio.

FM broadcast records are in the MP3 format, 192Kbps 32KHz for High quality (that results in about a megabyte for each recorded minute). You can also pause the recording if you want to skip the commercials for example.

There’s the radio widget too, which gives you control over the radio from the homescreen.

Audio quality is a mixed bag

The audio output of the Samsung S5620 Monte is generally pleasing save for a couple of minor flaws. The stereo crosstalk reading in our traditional test came up pretty mediocre, suggesting some leakage between the two channels.

Our other grudge is the cut-off extreme bass frequencies, but the Monte frequency response is excellent for the rest of the range.

The noise level and dynamic range readings are impressive and the distortion levels are also kept well under control. The volume levels are also pretty good.

Here go the results so you can see for yourselves how the Monte compares to its competition. You can find more info about the testing procedure and more results here.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Samsung S5620 Monte	+0.31, -3.11	-86.4	86.4	0.0074	0.797	-58.3
Samsung S5230 Star	+1.02, -2.41	-88.0	87.8	0.0045	0.222	-82.3
LG KP500 Cookie	+0.13, -0.32	-87.5	81.9	0.125	0.150	-63.0
LG GD880 mini	+0.36, -4.09	-59.9	59.9	1.183	1.012	-72.2
Apple iPod Touch 2G	+0.04, -0.05	-91.4	91.5	0.0027	0.012	-90.0
Apple iPhone 3GS	+0.01, -0.05	-92.1	92.1	0.0035	0.011	-95.0
Nokia 5630 XpressMusic	+0.13, -0.26	-94.0	94.8	0.466	0.876	-97.3

Samsung S5620 Monte vs LG GD880 mini frequency response graphs

The video player goes up to QVGA only

The video player has a simple interface with not too many features. All the basic are covered though.

The video player of Samsung S5620 Monte

The player supports MP4 videos (so, no DivX and such) but we only managed to get QVGA samples running. The VGA resolution videos we tried were a no go, even CIF (352 x 288 pixels) failed to play.