Mobile World Congress: Samsung Wave, 1st Bada smartphone

Update: while the Wave isn’t announced as having multitouch support, we’ve just seen some models on the stand that do offer it. Between now and when the Wave comes onto the market, multitouch support may well become available. We certainly hope so, though for now Samsung hasn’t been able to confirm this.

Wave (S8500), this is the name of the first Samsung phone based on Bada, their new open OS. With a large Super AMOLED touch screen, a new TouchWiz interface, Social Hub and Samsung Apps all on the programme.

The world number one in touch phone sales has now given a face to its new Bada OS (Bada means wave in Korean), presented last autumn. The Wave, the first terminal in a long series of Bada smartphones, is full of innovations. Enough to ensure that Samsung can provide a solid alternative to the batch of terminals based on Android (also offered by Samsung) this year?

1 GHz, the new standard for high end phones

No one will be getting too excited about how the Wave looks. It’s very obviously a Samsung phone. While many manufacturers put a lot of effort into design (LG) and/or the quality of the finish (HTC), Samsung is happy to reuse styles we’ve seen many times before. We do however like how slim and light it is.

The Wave has a very nice 3.3 inch Super Amoled screen (consuming less, according to Samsung, than the AMOLED screens we’ve already seen on some of their high end phones, with a resolution of 800x480, good contrast and excellent colours). Another advantage, the screen is more sensitive and precise to use.

Moving onto the technical spec, the Wave (118 x 56 x 10.9 mm) has a 5 Mpixel camera sensor with autofocus, face detection and geotagging, a 2 GB internal memory (can be extended to 32 GB with a micro SDHC), an HD video player and recorder (DivX and Xvid supported), an FM RDS transmitter and a standard audio out. The phone is 3G/3G+, has WiFi (n) and, for the first time on a phone, Bluetooth 3.0. The 1500 mAh battery is standard on this type of device.

In keeping with today’s high end smartphones, the Wave has a 1 GHz processor for fluid navigation: not a Qualcomm but a Samsung. Above and beyond chip performance, we know that the OS needs to be stable and perfectly integrated if the phone is going to run fluidly. After checking it out at the stand for a few minutes, we can confirm that the Wave reacts nicely. It remains to be seen how it handles multitasking.


Super AMOLED, but still not multitouch

When you go into the Wave’s menu, you expect to be coming into contact with a virtually perfect phone. Virtually because multitouch still isn’t supported. This is a shame because though the "one finger" feature means, with a bit of practice, you can zoom in and out on web pages, multitouch support is a must these days. Difficult to see how Samsung can justify this.

Samsung Apps

When it comes to the user interface, Samsung has fitted its new phone out with a reviewed and corrected version of Touchwiz seen before on the Player range. Version 3.0 offers a ten page cutomizable desktop and more intuitive navigation. When you look at it, you can’t help likening it to the iPhone interface. Even the handling of apps is organised in the same way.


The phone still has widgets. They’re better presented than on the phones in the Player range. Depending on what you want and need, users can pick and choose from Samsung Apps, the app store for the Bada OS. We don’t yet know how many apps are available on Samsung Apps. At the moment we only have their word to go on: "you’ll be able to find everything you need!". For now there have just been announcements about some of the categories available: electronic books, gaming, pro apps, entertainment.

Will developers, sollicited everywhere at the moment, bother to work on Bada apps as well as (or rather than) those for another platform (Apple, Google, Android, Symbian, Microsoft)? Samsung’s weight on the mobile phone market and the resulting visibility of Bada may well be enough to get the platform started. There is however some serious competition out there from the Apple AppStore and Google Android Market.

Share and unite

Instant messaging, mail accounts, social networks, communication now comes through many channels. The ideal? To unify them in the same place within an app designed to optimise management of contacts. This is what the Samsung Social Hub aims to do, with a Push mode to receive info from your virtual tribe in real time. From any contact card, the user can access the history of various exchanges: recent calls, messages, emails (Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync supported), Twitter, Myspace, photos exchanged, instant messaging chats. From what we can see, the application looks convincing. We’ll check out the Social Hub in more detail when we test the Wave and see if this solution measures up to the Sony Ericsson TimeScape contacts management system or Motorola’s Motoblur.

Aimed at a wide market, the Wave offers an easy-to-use option with some good arguments in its favour to satisfy a large number of users who want an all-rounder multimedia, ready-to-go phone.

The Wave is expected to come onto the market in the UK in April. The price hasn’t yet been announced but Samsung tells us it should be under the £400 mark.


 

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