Samsung Wave II

The Wave II is the successor to the Wave, the first successful phone to run Samsung's new Bada operating system. It features a larger screen, but less memory, with 16 GB instead of 32 GB.

Is it merely a larger copy of the Wave—first released just six months ago—or does it bring anything new to the table? Is it as good as its big brother or an improvement? We'll let you know ...

Keeping it in the family

It's hard not to compare the two phones given that they share the same thin, elegant silhouette, with the new version just a touch larger than the old. The case is still made in brushed metal and the finish is absolutely perfect.


Handling the phone is a real treat. The buttons under the screen and around the edges haven't moved and are as easy to reach as ever. The one disappointing feature is that the MicroSD card is still hidden underneath the battery.


As we mentioned above, the new model has a larger screen, with a 3.7'' 490 x 800 pixel display replacing the earlier 3.3'' display. The Super AMOLED technology has been abandoned in favour of a Super Clear LCD panel. Based on our first impressions, we'd say it provides slightly less contrast than the Super AMOLED with less flashy, but more accurate, colours. Our tests showed that the contrast is excellent and that colours are reproduced accurately.

Ready to use

The phone loads up quickly and you soon find yourself in the Bada interface, tweaked to feature Samsung's TouchWiz 3.0 skin. As with the first Wave, users can organise their phone by choosing which widgets and shortcuts to add to which homescreen. You can launch several apps at once. To see which apps are currently running, and close any you don't need, a long press on the central button will do the job.

We would have liked a simpler interface that collected messages as they arrive from every contact at once. In the same way, we would have preferred to be able to see all of our interactions with one contact in the same place, wherever they came from.

The Social Hub feature is still there and allows you to bring together Twitter, Gmail and Facebook and bring together your contacts from different accounts.

The combination of a stable OS and a 1 GHz ARM Cortex A8 processor ensures that the handset runs smoothly, whether you're scrolling through a web page, taking photos, loading an app or firing up a feature.


Samsung's carefully developed OS is backed up, of course, by an app platform, Samsung apps. It's nowhere near as well-stocked as the Apple AppStore or Android Market, but you should still be able to find enough to yourself busy, with plenty of useful (news, weather, cinema listings ...) and less useful (games) titles available for download.

Like its older brother, the Wave II joins the exclusive club of smartphones that you can use out of the box. No technical knowledge is needed so you can get started straight away.


Multimedia

The browser (Dolphin 2.2) is powerful: you can skip easily from page to another and the multitouch zoom (available either by pinching your fingers together or double-tap on the screen) works well. You get tools for managing your browsing of course, including history and favourites.


The Wave II produces a pretty reasonable sound for a handset in this class. As ever, though, you should probably replace the bundled headphones with your own. There's also an FM radio.

Like lots of other Samsung phones, the Wave II can play DivX and Xvid files natively without the need for any recoding beforehand. It's not bad at recording video either, and means you can capture a few snippets of everyday life in decent quality 720p HD which is almost entirely free of judder.

Before we finish the test, we should talk about the camera. Although the first Wave really struggled in this area, the Wave II has clearly benefited from a lot of extra work. The results are much better and the amount of detail visible is perfectly acceptable for a smartphone. Even though there's an LED flash, you'll have to put up with a lot of electronic noise in dark conditions.



You should find that the battery lasts all day without any problems.