Smartphone sound design is a funny thing. For most of us, we hear the sounds of our phone’s notifications, alarms and ringtones every day, but rarely do we really actively listen to the noises and melodies they're comprised of. One person who does – and spends a lot of time thinking about them besides –  is Samsung Mobile’s Senior Sound Designer, Myoung Woo Nam. On a recent trip to South Korea, we got the chance to speak with Nam to get an understanding of just how much work goes into finding the perfect tone or melody for different devices functions – and straddling the fine line between being informative, but not so attention-demanding that a sound becomes annoying. 

Myoung Woo Nam kicked off an explanation of his department’s role with a scene from 2013 space-thriller Gravity, where the film’s protagonist gets stranded on a Russian segment of the International Space Station and has to try to navigate using the foreign labels on the flight system’s controls. Eventually, she manages to narrow down the command she was looking for by using a series of feedback beeps and alarm noises.

Nam said that they have very much the same design ethos for smartphones, with every interface noise intended to give feedback or provide some 'universal' audio alert that (hopefully) transcends the various languages the phone's available in. Nam explained, “This is a good example of how the Audio User Interface is important. Once the person hears the sound they should be able to understand what it means, regardless of what language they use. Like music. Everyone can understand.”

Samsung's sound engineering team is responsible for creating the Audio User Interfaces for all of the technology company's devices – not just smartphones. That includes everything from air conditioners to smartwatches and, says Nam, each category throws up its own novel challenges and opportunities. For example, according to Nam, “Samsung’s air conditioner takes time to start. About 10 seconds.

“And during this time, we want to give an appropriate message to the user that it’s going to be very cold soon, but it will take a little while, so please be patient.”

When talking with Nam, it’s clear just how much thought goes into creating the sounds on the company's various devices. The sound team challenge themselves to create on and off sounds that you can understand without knowing which action was taken. “A higher-pitched tone is temperature up, the low-pitched tone means a lower temperature, but we also wanted to give the exact meaning for the power on and the power off,” Nam continued. “You should be able to guess which is which. That’s a human instinct, it’s a musical language that’s embedded in the sound design.” 

For a refrigerator like Samsung’s Family Hub it’s handy to have an alert for when you accidentally leave the door open, but Nam stresses just how difficult it is to find something that will notify you without being annoying or unnecessarily loud. 

Taking a different tack altogether with the sound design of Samsung’s Gear S smartwatch, Nam talks about how it is important for the sound engineering team to come up with a unifying theme for the product they’re looking at. “One of the concepts of the Gear series was the tick-tock of time,” said Nam. “The tick is at 60bpm so we double it to 120bpm. Every sound [on the Gear S watch] is at 120bpm, that’s the moderato.” 

The Sound of the Galaxy

While there are plenty of sounds to be created across the wide range of devices that Samsung sell, nothing keeps the sound team quite as busy as the company’s Galaxy Smartphones. Nam said there’s over 100 unique noises, melodies and pieces of music that need to be generated, in addition to keeping up the longstanding tradition of creating a unique version of Samsung Mobile’s audio branding tune Over the Horizon, each year.   If you’ve ever heard the cacophony of notification noises that ring out when a plane lands these days, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with the Over the Horizon tune. Samsung has made a point of updating this melody each year, to keep the audio signature front of mind, without it becoming repetitive. “Over the Horizon has changed each year since 2011.” Explained Nam, “The first version was a rock version that was supposed to represent ‘beyond the smart experience’ and the second one in the Galaxy S3 was ‘Designed for Humans’, so we made it a softer tune that’s a little bit New Wavey, but you still have the same melody.”

Fast forward to 2015, when the sound design team partnered up with the Nashville String Machine and renowned audio engineer Al Schmitt to mix a version of the melody around the theme of ‘Fresh Impression’. This transformed into a jazz-fusion rendition by the Dirty Loops for 2016’s ‘Consideration’ iteration and was updated again this year for the Galaxy S8. The 6th Over the Horizon iteration, ‘Millennials’, came to fruition through an original composition from the young English Musical prodigy Jacob Collier. “We had to find the most Millennial artist possible, someone who is expected to become very famous,” said Nam. “After we worked with him, he received Grammy Awards, so we were right.” Taking a little  pride in uncovering this talent early, Nam added, “If we are trying to work [with Collier] right now we might have to pay twice or triple what we did at the time.”

Samsung's new beats for the Note 8

The distinguishing factor of Samsung’s Galaxy Note series is the additional stylus, and Nam said the sound team really wanted to do something to highlight this unique feature on the popular phablet. Attempting to marry the S Pen and ‘Millennial’ themes, the sound team stumbled across a YouTube-based music scene, where pens tapping on objects forms the driving beat of the rhythms. 'Pen beat', as the genre is called, has a reasonable following in South Korea and the sound team managed to find a local pen-beat artist to work with. “One particular young musician from the pen beat videos caught our eye and we contacted him and brought him in to record the ringtones alongside a well-known beatboxer.” Said Nam, “We gathered the pen beat and the beatboxer together to make something interesting for the sound of the Galaxy Note 8.” 

The team also sourced a local producer that was well-versed in mixing beatboxing to oversee the creation of three new ringtones and a series of notification and alert noises for the flagship phablet. The collaboration resulted in a couple of these songs being recorded in full and made available for free to Note 8 owners in a high-resolution DSD-audio-format.  

If you aren’t lucky enough to have upgraded to the Note 8 yet, however, you can still check out the new beats on Samsung's newsroom page.

Joel Burgess flew to South Korea courtesy of Samsung Australia.

The rear camera is one of the most hotly-contested (and ruthlessly-promoted) features in today’s premium smartphones — a fact driven home by the constant jousting for top spot in DxOMark’s renowned best mobile camera rankings. The competition has become so close that, even when vendors like Apple, Google, Samsung or Sony launch a new phone that takes out first place, that ‘winner’ often has to share the lead position — and ultimately, almost all of them have their short reigns overthrown within a few months, or less.

Over the last couple of years, dual rear cameras have slowly become the norm for flagship smartphones, but this year’s Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus bucked that trend by sticking with the same 12-megapixel, single-sensor camera spec that was used in their 2016 predecessors, with just a few enhancements to boost overall picture quality and performance. That's made the new Note 8 the first device from Samsung that includes a dual-camera array, which — as always — brings with it a raft of much-touted new photography features. 

In a recent visit to Samsung's headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, we chatted to Dr. Yoon Young Kwon from the company’s Advanced Camera R&D Group about the work that goes into building one of the best smartphone cameras on the market, and why the electronics giant decided to change a winning formula for the Note 8. Addressing the larger picture, Dr. Kwon explained that the company’s ultimate goal with its cameras is fairly straightforward.

“Our main focus is to make sure the users feel satisfied with the photos that they take,” he told us. “Samsung started to research the dual camera because we believed it had the potential to offer features that were difficult or impossible to provide through single lens cameras.”

The not so 'mega' pixel

 According to Kwon, Samsung began researching dual-sensor and lens cameras between four and five years ago, but the reason it's only first appeared in the Note 8 is due to timing. The Note 8's launch has lined up with a time when there's less demand to increase megapixel counts just for the same of doing so, accompanied by a new interest in optical zoom – a feature that’s prevalent with dual camera arrays. Kwon explained that "the megapixel is just one of the factors that influence the picture quality of cameras. If you have a higher megapixel count, that’s more advantageous for printing and large displays, however this also means that the image’s pixel size goes down, which results in lower resolution and lower colour accuracy.”

“We believe that the smartphone user trend is shifting toward on-device photo consumption, where increasing the individual pixel size is helpful for picture quality. Currently, the majority of consumers take the pictures on the device, view them on the device and then share it on the device,” said Kwon. 

Bokeh in full bloom

One of the key features that the dual rear camera brings is an effect called ‘bokeh’ where a photo has a particular object in focus, but anything behind or in front of the subject is blurred into obscurity. 

"In order to create the bokeh effect, you need to measure the distance between the camera and the object that you are shooting. Using the dual cameras you get two perspectives and, based on the differences between the two images, you can extract the depth information and create the bokeh effect," Kwon explained.

Single lens cameras can create this effect using dual-pixel sensors, but Kwon noted that this technique is generally too 'noisy' to provide consistent results. "The purpose of the dual pixel camera that we’ve had since the S7 is not to create the bokeh effect, but to accelerate the autofocus," said Kwon.

“[In dual pixel cameras], behind one lens there are two different image sensor pixels, so you have light coming from the left and light coming from the right. You compare the different intensity of the light coming from the left to that of the right, and based on the difference you can estimate the depth and you can estimate the required focus,” explained Kwon. “In DSLRs, there is the face difference technology, which measures the distance between the camera and the object based on face information.” Further iterating his stance on single lens setups, Kwon stated that ”these techniques only provide partial information of what we need and are more noisy than the dual-camera technology. They do not provide enough information to create the bokeh effect.” He explained that “even in the future, it will be difficult to create the bokeh effect using a single lens dual pixel technology.”   

That said, the Pixel 2 smartphone, which launched shortly after the Note 8, has manage to score higher in DxOMark, despite its single lens camera. Google’s taken a left-of-field approach however, relying on machine learning algorithms for detecting subtle patterns in dual-pixel readings, which allows it to get a convincing bokeh effect with a just a single lens. It's a novel breakthrough that defies the former understanding of the limitations in dual pixel technology. 

Through another lens

The Note 8’s two cameras consist of a 12-megapixel, 26mm, f/1.7 dual-pixel wide angle camera with a 1/2.55" sensor size and 1.4µm pixel size, alongside a 12-megapixel, 52mm, f/2.4, telephoto lens with a 1/3.6" sensor size and a 1.0µm pixel size. In and of itself, simply having two cameras should be enough to give a photographic advantage, but the particular combination of cameras can dramatically shift the feature set from one dual lens camera array to another. 

“We chose the combination of a wide angle lens and a telephoto lens because we believed this would be able to provide a very crisp and clear long distance optical zoom that no other smartphone has been able to provide yet,“ said Dr. Kwon. 

For consumers, the new camera array brings new features like 2x optical zoom, Live Focus (with realtime bokeh effect) and Dual Capture modes while reducing background noise and improving the low-light quality of video capture. Both cameras have optical image stabilisation and an enhanced set of image processing features, adding up to a considerable bump in the camera quality on the Note 8, as we noted in our review.

Moreover, despite Google throwing its considerable AI advantage behind the Pixel 2's camera, the Note 8 still produced very good results — even outdoing the Google in some areas. Check out our video face-off where we compare the two (alongside the iPhone 8 Plus and Huawei Mate 10 Pro) and see for yourself.

Joel Burgess flew to Seoul courtesy of Samsung Australia.

Chinese smartphone manufacturer Oppo has announced the arrival of the successor to its popular mid-range R9S smartphone today. The all-new 5.5-inch R11 manages to pack a dual rear camera, the company’s trademark 20MP front facing selfie camera, a well-specced processor, fast charging and lightning-fast fingerprint sensors into this exceptionally sleek-looking device.

A new Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 processor gives the handset an expected performance boost, but also adds compatibility with traditionally high-end exclusive technologies like the high-res Bluetooth audio file transfer technology aptX and allows the device to utilise faster multi-channel 2x2 MIMO Wi-Fi connections. 

The R11 continues with Oppo’s streamlined custom operating system ColorOS 3.1, which is based on Android 7.1, and is supported by 4GB of RAM, 64GB of onboard memory, microSD card support and a 3,000mAh battery.  

Photo Oppo-tunity

Oppo has always made the camera an important feature of its smartphone devices, so it’s no surprise that the R11 continues this trend, upgrading the processor to allow 4K video capture at 30fps and using a HDR colour gamut. 

The R11’s 20MP and 16MP rear cameras are a first in the mid-range category and combine to allow 2x optical zoom and better HDR and low-light photography, but also feature slightly different aspect ratios that allow you to capture portrait and landscape photos using full frames.  

If you’re into smartphone photography then there are plenty of features to justify the $649 price tag on Oppo's latest flagship. Australian pre-orders for the R11 will start on July 31, 2017 from JB Hi-Fi with a release date of August 7, 2017. It will be available to purchase from JB Hi-Fi, The Good Guys, Officeworks, Optus and Woolworths Mobile, with Vodafone getting the handset a couple of days later on August 9, 2017.

In Singapore, the Oppo R11 carries a price of S$699.00 and can be purchased directly from the Oppo website. 

Virgin Mobile is also offering the R11 on a $45 per month plan on a 24-month contract that includes 2GB of monthly data. 

• Check out our in depth review of Oppo's previous flagship handset, the Oppo R9s