We have spoken about Samsung i450's competitors and Samsung's approach to S60, as well as the i450's build, its software, connectivity, and the camera. Now it's the time for the audio section.

The music section should be the most important on the phone. It is the focus of the device.

To start, the earphones are not intended for the phone's 3.5mm jack. I honestly don't understand where Samsung's engineers had their heads. If you are going to include such a feature, atleast give some use to it. For one reason I understand their choice: the 3.5mm jack is very soft in volume. The Samsung port is bad, but this jack is worst. I hope the soft sound amplification is just a firmware setting gone wrong, if it's hardware fault then this is one of the worst music phones we came across. That's just because of a simple hardware piece, and yes, it is my opinion. But then again, it is difficult to believe it's hardware problem, according to the specifications sheet, the i450 has ICEpower® amplifier developed by Bang & Olufsen, which is quite a respected sounds systems manufacturer.

I cannot criticize the music application the same way. The GUI is very attractive, and the navi-wheel surely helps the browsing of music lists. There are many equalizer settings, although the lack of good quality output through the earphone jack isn't very helpful, so the way the equalizer options are mostly enjoyable is with the loudspeaker.

Talking about the loudspeaker, notice that it's on the back platform. This looks innovative and fashionable, but as soon as you close the sliding platform, the volume softens, and this is an design fault. For ringtone, and loudspeaker on voice calls the volume intensity won't be very good, so it might have been better to relocate the speaker to somewhere else.

I was wondering what would be better: the navi-wheel as it is on the back platform, or music buttons, such as on the Nokia N95. I compared both phones in an article, so you can check my opinions there.

Another software mistake is that you can only have a few determined music commands in portrait mode, while on landscape mode you cannot execute those commands, such as backwards and forward.

The i450's media player is compatible with MP3, AAC, AAC+, AAC+e, Real, WMA formats.

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