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Phone Reviews: Mobiles and Smartphones >
Vincent Alzieu
Translator: Sam McGeever
Test date: February 18, 2011
The Samsung Wave 533 as a phone

We're starting to miss good old-fashioned candybar phones with solid, phyiscal buttons. We've already pointed out that the Wave 533 is slow, but that even extends to scrolling through your phonebook or typing in a numer to dial. It's a very frustrating experience.

Voice calls are even worse. The speakerphone is dreadful, but things aren't much better without it. The other caller sounds muffled and you'd have to be very undemanding to be satisfied with quality this bad ...


Your mission, should you choose to accept it: produce a smartphone with a slide-out physical keyboard for the lowest possible.  Samsung has taken that challenge on with its Wave 533 mobile.  Does that keyboard make it the perfect choice for users who send hundreds of text messages and status updates every five minutes?


According to our tests, the display reproduces colours accurately

During our tests, we discovered plenty of problems with the Wave 533, but also something that we weren't expecting to find on a handset like this: a display with accurate colours.  To put things simply, it obtained the very best results we've ever seen since we started testing the displays on mobile devices, despite blacks that could be a little deeper.  Raw results: the contrast ratio was 730:1 and the average dicrepancy between the source colours and those shown on screen, or the deltaE, was 3.7.

Big is beautiful?  The Wave 533 measures 1.5 cm thick.
 

That isn't enough to make up for all of the problems though, which taken together mean we can't recommend this phone which cuts corners at every opportunity.


If you have a lot of DivX videos, then you can look forward to converting them using the Samsung Kies software

To cut a long story short, this phone's problems include the fact that isn't very responsive, can't play DivX files and doesn't have 3G.  The sound is awful whichever way you listen to it, whether that's via dreadful headphones, the mediocre speaker or the muffled voice calls, and the Bada platform isn't anywhere near as well-developed as Android.  There are very few applications, and the fact that you can't download popular game Angry Birds but instead have to pay good money for alternatives with dreadful graphics is very telling ...

















Photos taken using the 3 Megapixel camera are good enough for the display on the Wave 533.
Colours are captured accurately, apart from white, which is overexposed.
The absence of autofocus means the photos are cruelly lacking in sharpness.
You can click on the photos to see the raw results in the Product Face-Off.

What's wrong with the spec

  • There's a 455 MHz processor even though 1 GHz is becoming increasingly standard.
  • Connectivity is provided by Edge, not 3G.
  • It's incapable of video beyond 320 x 240 pixels, but the competition is increasingly likely to offer HD.
  • The camera doesn't have autofocus, so while the photos look OK on the phone itself, they are disappointing when you export them to a computer.
  • The resolution on the screen is just 240 x 400 pixels, a quarter of the number of pixels offered on the recent Samsung Wave II.  Browsing the web without 3G is already frustratingly slow, but that makes it worse.
  • Finally, the Samsung Store that comes with Bada OS might be getting better, but it's still a long way behind Apple and Google ...


Browsing the web with 240 x 400 pixels isn't much fun!

It strikes us that the real purpose of this phone is to fulfil the desires of people making an impulse buy.  The combination of an attractive price, a glossy black exterior (which gets dirty very quickly!), a physical keyboard (great quality, even if it does take a little getting used to) and a touschreen is designed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible in the hope that nobody wonders if there aren't any better alternatives.


Despite looking totally flat, the keyboard is well-made ...


...but if you don't like it of course, you can use the virtual keyboard.

Also with Android: the Galaxy 551

But without looking much further afield, there's an alternative which, on paper at least, seems like a much better deal.  At almost exactly the same time, Samsung also launched the Galaxy 551, which has the same exterior as the Wave 533 and the same physical keyboard.  But the 551 runs Android 2.2, so it promises battery life that's twice as good, native support for DivX video and a more powerful 667 MHz processor.  Many operators have it for the same price as the 553, but it will of course still suffer from the same low resolution video and display.



One last photo: that glossy black case
One last point about battery life.  It's clear that the 533 is likely to be used more frequently for relatively undemanding tasks like text messaging and should be able to last for days on end if that's all you use it for.  But if you ignore the dreadful screen and insist on trying to play videos (which you've had to convert yourself), you only get 5 hours 30 minutes of playback—around half as much as on an iPhone 4.

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Samsung Wave 533

Pluses

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Good physical keyboard

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Screen reproduces colours accurately

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Direct access to the memory card slot

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Bada OS is clear, colourful and uncomplicated

Minuses

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Bada Store has far fewer applications than Apple or Google equivalents

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Very low resolution display and video mode

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No native DivX support, no 3G, poor battery life if you use it as a media player

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1.5 thick

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Processor isn't powerful enough so the phone hangs

2
Although including a physical keyboard is a good idea in principle, Samsung has gone astray by producing an awful display with a quarter of the usual resolution, a processor that's twice as slow and a very limited media player. If you're still tempted, why not try the almost-identical Samsung Galaxy 551 which at least runs Android.

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