Serenata

DaBoss has a new toy a co-built B&O Samsung mobile phone/music player and yes of course muggins here has to set it up. When I saw a picture of it my initial statement was "It's an upside-down iPod" and my opinion hasn't changed now it's in my hands. Anyhoo onto setup, switch it on and you get a little tutorial which is skipable (if you know how). The little booklet accompanying it claims that the phone is "based on an intuitive user interface" which should put a chill down the spine of any IT professional as this translates to 'We're not going to tell you how to do anything, so look it up in the 200-page plus CD guide'.

It's not bad, but not intuitve I had to set the time twice... sigh here you go - you use the wheel to scroll to the time setting, then press the middle OK button then use the wheel to advance or retard the hour setting. Now given it's a wheel how do you progress to setting the minutes? Well like an idiot I pressed right on the wheel, which tried to take me out of the setting, of course I should have pressed OK to advance then OK to set then right to move on. The Getting Started Guide has nothing on this at all.

But hey that's okay time to hook it up to the PC and it uses Bluetooth yay take that iPhone. Samsung's PC Studio disc goes in whirs like a mad thing and pops up an annoying flash interface plus music you can't turn off until the whooshy dialogue appears. English and Install... Yes I accept terms and conditions... BSOD Vista crashes.

Restart "hmm one-off glitch?", I muse. Install... BSOD crash. Check the disc again yes Windows 2000, XP, and Vista. I go online to see if anyone else has the same trouble. Big surprise yes, turns out Samsung and Vista aren't seeing eye-to-eye but if you install it using compatability mode it'll be fine.

Change settings, install, yay! it's got further this time... 'installing drivers this may take a few minutes' yeah right normally blips past in seconds. I waited... I got the post, I opened the post, I sorted the post, and then it finally finished.

Now it's running LiveUpdate and picking up 301 updates I kid thee not, all individual files so it's blipping through, but sheesh.

Oh and for anyone wondering why I didn't check online first for a later version I did, but the Serenata isn't supported on the Samsung site, this software isn't on the B&O site, and the only time I could find a copy of Studio it offered me two different files for Vista without an explanation as to the difference.

Oh Huzzah it's finished and applied the updates and didn't even need a reboot I can now finally start the programme... wow that's shit no really I mean it here look for yourselves.
Oh and it's a fixed size box so no I can't stretch it wider. Oh gods all the other dialogue boxes are the same, I may have to set visual themes to off for every damn mini-programme. I mean it works just damn difficult to see as some of the boxes run off the window edge and the scroll bars are about a pixel-wide.

Oh and though it'll sync the contacts etc. via Bluetooth to get music onto it you need to hook it up via its (propitiatory of course) USB cable and despite being described in the guide as a Mass Storage Device it needs its own driver... which doesn't seem to work in Vista.