Samsung S8500 Wave

Enter a new platform. With a boom. With a bang. A Bada kind of bang. Another of the big guns wants to play by their own rules. Samsung’s second spot in global market share was hard fought but it will be a while before they as much as wish the same for the Bada. They’ve been a consistent innovator over the last couple of years but getting baby Bada up and running must be quite a challenge.

Over the past years new touchscreen platforms have been spreading like wildfire but not all of them have managed to catch on as well as their developers must have been hoping. Android fares well but still hasn’t quite overcome its growing pains, while the well settled Symbian platform is still coming to terms with touchscreen.

Samsung S8500 Wave at a glance General:GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS 1900/2100 MHz, EDGE class 10, HSDPA 7.2 Mbps and HSUPA 2 Mbps Form factor:Touchscreen bar Dimensions:10.9 mm thin Display:3.3" 16M-color Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with 16:9 aspect ratio and 480 x 800 pixels resolution, scratch-resistant glass surface Platform: Bada OS CPU: 1 GHz processor Memory: 2GB internal memory, microSD card slot Camera: 5-megapixels auto-focus camera, 720p video recording Connectivity: Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n with WPS support, Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP, standard microUSB port, GPS receiver with A-GPS, 3.5mm audio jack Misc: Accelerometer for screen auto rotate, proximity sensor for screen auto-turn-off, ambient light sensor, FM radio with RDS, DivX/XviD support, multi-touch input and pinch-zooming gestures Battery: 1500 mAh battery

Display Samsung were obviously not cutting corners with design and the S8500 Wave is a pretty sleek device indeed. The slim metallic body is elegant and solid, and well resistant to fingerprints too.

As with any full-touch phone, the front of the Samsung S8500 Wave is dominated by the 3.3” touchscreen. And just a look at it is enough to prove us wrong – the device does have a killer feature, only it’s not evident by just scanning the spec sheet.

The 3.3” 16M-color capacitive touchscreen on the Samsung S8500 Wave is pure perfection. Hard as we tried, we just couldn’t find anything wrong with it. And certainly couldn’t think of anything at least remotely similar.

The AMOLED display technology has a great edge over LCD as far as contrast is concerned and that’s no news. But the S8500 Wave has the deepest blacks we have seen yet on a mobile phone. Of course, next to - say - the Omnia HD the difference isn’t so great, but it’s still noticeable. Besides, this time brightness got a boost too, which makes the S8500 Wave display image quality all the more impressive.

Design and construction Under the display we find the only three hardware keys on the Samsung S8500 Wave front panel. The Call and End knobs are either side of the menu key. Those are all large enough and with good press, so no usability issues are to be expected.

Whether or not you will like the transition between touchscreen and hardware keys is another question but it doesn’t have a straight answer.

Unfortunately, the microSD card slot is below the battery so hot-swapping is out of the question.

The build quality of the Samsung S8500 Wave is commendable even at this early stage and we only hope they keep it up. As far as hardware is concerned, the handset actually delivers more than expected and that’s rare to be seen recently.

User interface: TouchWiz just got smarter We guess it's fashionable to roll out new operating systems. Google stepped up with Android, Nokia are making a new start in touchscreen with the Maemo, HTC have gone a step backwards with the Brew Mobile (is this an operating system at all?). So, it was about time Samsung introduced their own OS as well. Meet the Bada OS.

To get it straight, the Bada OS looks just like TouchWiz - with even more eye candy and with the option of running native apps on it. Samsung are waving the "Smartphones for everyone" flag but maybe it has less to do with affordability than ease of use. It took five minutes for the S8500 Wave to feel like just another neat touchscreen feature phone Samsung seem to have in excess.

Text input Capacitive touchscreens usually won't give you handwriting recognition but the S8500 Wave is among the few exceptions. It certainly doesn't have the largest screen possible but handwriting recognition is there. As expected, you can hardly draw more than one character at a time but that's still something!

If you prefer typing to drawing, go for the on-screen keyboards. You get two options - a portrait numpad and a landscape full-QWERTY keyboard. Given the not so big screen, the the QWERTY keyboard is not the most comfortable. The keys could've been a bit bigger and better arranged - after all, the messages you compose don't need that much space.

Gallery is smooth and sweet The gallery or Media Browser, as Samsung call it, is basic - all images and clips are displayed all at once as small thumbs. When you select a file you can see it in either portrait or landscape mode.

The gallery supports pinch-zooming alright.

Multimedia on the go Multimedia is certainly a S8500 Wave forte. The brilliant display is great for watching videos. The interface of the video player follows the logic of whole UI. Settings and options are a tap away, otherwise hidden when not needed.

The Samsung S8500 Wave supports DivX/XviD files out of the box. Subtitles are welcome as well. Interestingly, you can search for a specific scene using the "Mosaic search" feature. It breaks the clip down to 16 or 36 parts and displays the first frame of each to help you find the scene you're looking for.

The music player has been redone as well. Tracks are sorted by albums, artists, genres, composers, etc. You can hide some of those sorting options if you don't use them. At the end only those that you've marked will be displayed on top of the screen (as tabs) while the ones you have unmarked will be gone.

The major improvements however are only visible when you use the music player in landscape mode. Comparison to iPhone's Cover flow is inevitable with some important differences. Browsing albums or tracks is pretty standard in portrait mode: you get a list of all songs or albums, each with a small thumb. The list is smoothly scrollable with impressive kinetic effect.

If you're browsing in landscape mode you'll be getting an album art arch of virtual CDs. Tapping on a CD will expand it to show all the tracks within the given album.

Alternatively, sweeping down across the screen (from the arrow above the central CD) will display a virtual dial to let you search the albums or tracks alphabetically.

A promising 5-megapixel sharpshooter The second Samsung S8500 Wave unit we accommodate at our office turned out a pre-marketing sample as well. However, this one has an operational camera along with the previously missing camera key.

The Samsung S8500 Wave is capable of taking 5 megapixel photos and capturing 720p videos.

The S8500 camera viewfinder is quite reminiscent of company's recent cameraphones. The comfortable interface is nicely touch-optimized and has all you need on the two vertical bars on each side of the viewfinder.

A promising 5-megapixel sharpshooter The second Samsung S8500 Wave unit we accommodate at our office turned out a pre-marketing sample as well. However, this one has an operational camera along with the previously missing camera key.

The Samsung S8500 Wave is capable of taking 5 megapixel photos and capturing 720p videos.

The S8500 camera viewfinder is quite reminiscent of company's recent cameraphones. The comfortable interface is nicely touch-optimized and has all you need on the two vertical bars on each side of the viewfinder.

Video recording

The Wave captures 720p videos. Like the Sony Ericsson Vivaz, the S8500 Wave features continuous autofocus during video recording, which allows it to act just like a dedicated video camera.

Samsung are still mum on the video frame rate. Our unit outputs videos at 30fps but under closer inspection of those, there seemed to be only 24 unique frames while the 6 other were duplicates.

But having a steady 24fps is actually a good thing as it provides for a relatively smooth playback. After all, big screen movies are all shot as 24 fps. The Samsung Omnia HD was also trying out for a 24fps output but it hardly reached that with its videos running around 20-22 fps.

All-you-can-eat connectivity Smartphones are usually well-heeled in terms of connectivity and the Samsung Wave is no exception: all contemporary means of data transfer are supported.

All kinds of network connectivity are at the user disposal - GPRS, EDGE and 3G with HSDPA (7.2Mbps) and HSUPA (2.0Mbps). The GSM/EDGE networking of course comes in quad-band flavor and the 3G in dual-band - 900/2100MHz.

The Wave is the first mobile phone to support the new Bluetooth version 3.0. Naturally, A2DP is also supported. To activate Bluetooth (and Wi-Fi), you can use the dedicated control hidden in the notification area on top of the screen.

The S8500 also packs a standard microUSB port. You can choose from 4 connection modes - Media player, PC Internet, Mass storage and Samsung Kies. Samsung Kies is the new software used to connect your Samsung mobile phone to a computer. Interestingly, in mass storage mode the phone mounts its internal memory (2 or 8 GB, depending on the device) and not the memory card inside it.

Wi-Fi with WPS is also at hand. WPS stands for Wi-Fi Protected Setup and it's a hassle-free way to pair a wireless device with your secured network. As long as your wireless router supports the feature, pressing the dedicated button on it allows it to pair with the Samsung Wave.

Web browser Samsung S8500 Wave packs a Webkit-based Samsung Dolphin Browser 2.0. You can have multiple pages opened at the same time and we guess the browser is supposed to support Flash - there's a dedicated setting for it. However, the browser of our unit didn't work properly so we can't confirm Flash video support.

The web browser interface is reminiscent of the Samsung S8000 Jet. There's multi-touch support, so you can make use of the pinch-zooming feature.

You can also double tap a block of text or an image and the handset will automatically zoom in on it. Another double tap and you are back to the previous zoom level.

The web browser also offers kinetic scrolling and fullscreen view mode. The lack of auto-complete when typing the address of already browsed websites is a letdown, though.

Applications The System Manager was the first telltale sign the Wave is actually a smartphone. It consists of three tabs. The first one shows the battery info, while the second and the third inform you on the CPU usage and the memory status, respectively. Along with the CPU usage you can also see the currently running apps and you can start the Application manager.