Samsung Wave

Its smart looks, excellent feature set and aggressive pricing makes it a great buy

 

 

 

Excellent design, build and finish, stunning display, smooth interface, good quality camera, 720p video recording, HD video playback (including MKV), superb audio quality, multitasking support, terrific value for money

Clumsy web browser interface, no lens cover, no ambient light adjustment, too few apps on the Samsung store as of now 

A high resolution Super AMOLED display, 1GHz processor, 5 megapixel camera with 720p video recording, HD video playback, Bada OS; the Samsung Wave has the kind of specifications list that will strike fear in the heart of competition and leave the consumers drooling. And if that wasn't enough Samsung has dared to price the phone very competitively. But is it really good? We decided to find out.

Bundle

• Samsung Wave
• Battery (1500 mAh Li-Ion)
• Charger
• Stereo Headser
• USB Cable
• 2GB microSD card + SD adaptor
• Pouch
• User Guide
• Software CD

 Design & Construction

The Wave is one of the most elegantly designed phone that I've seen. It has a very classy look to it, thanks to the minimalistic design cues and use of a brushed metal finish, and that dark grey body. Chrome finish has been used sparingly on the edges of the Home key and the markings on the call and end keys. The keys on the bottom of the display are made of plastic but are well finished and feel solid and comfortable to use. The display gently curves downwards so that when you turn the phone around it rests on the top and bottom edges with the display well out of harms way. When not illuminated the display has a cool blue look to it.

On the top edge of the display are the earpiece, video call camera and the proximity sensor. An ambient light sensor is sorely missing here. Turn the phone around and you'll see that the phone's rear side gently curves around to form the sides as well. On the right edge is the phone lock key and the camera shutter button. Considering the capable camera on board, I would have liked a more prominent and tactile button for the shutter.

Display

The Samsung Wave has a 3.3", 800 x 480 pixel, AMOLED display. But this isn't just any other AMOLED display. Samsung is calling it the Super AMOLED display and according to them it is 20% brighter than standard AMOLED displays. They consume 20% less power and yet are 80% more viewable under sunlight.

So to put this claim to test, we took the Wave outside in the sun. Unfortunately, thanks to monsoon, the sun is rarely out, but despite that we can still see that the Super AMOLED was crystal clear and definitely better than the AMOLED display on the Samsung Omnia HD. However, the problem is that the Wave lacks an ambient light sensor. So if you have the brightness turned down on your phone when you were indoors, then you'd have to turn it up manually when you step out. Despite its advantage over standard AMOLED, the Super AMOLED can only work its magic when the brightness is turned all the way up.

Indoors, the quality of display is nothing short of brilliant. In fact I think Samsung should keep the Wave with its display turned on in the shops and people will buy the phone simply by looking at the display. Incredible colors, deep blacks, the display brings everything to life and the menu icons look like they are freshly painted on the display.

The viewing angles are superb as well and no matter how you view it the image still looks the same. Samsung has also reduced the distance between the display and the touchscreen layer, which makes you feel you are touching the display itself. The resolution is also very high and cramming so many pixels in that little area makes everything look sharp and crystal clear. And no, you cannot see individual pixels on this display. And for the record, the display pixel density is 282 PPI on the Wave. The display on the Wave is also smudge and scratch resistant.

Update: Closer examination of the Wave's display revealed that it uses the same RGBG PenTile matrix display invented by Samsung. This is the same display technology used on the Nexus One, since Samsung provides display to HTC. In this type of display, each pixel has one green color element and one double width red or blue element. As such each pixel has a green element but only one red or blue element. This means only half the pixels have either blue or red elements, so half the red or blue color information passed on to the display is discarded. This gives rise to some problems, as mentioned in this article on Ars Technica. However, the Super AMOLED display on the Wave is bit better off than the Nexus One apart from having a slight green cast to grayscale images there was none of the rainbow effect as seen on the Nexus One's display. This however has no effect on your everyday viewing and is not something to worry about.
 

Samsung Wave's display, showing the PenTile RGBG pixel layout.

Under the Hood

The Samsung Wave runs on a 1GHz Samsung S5PC110 processor based on the ARM Cortex A8 chipset, also known as 'Hummingbird'. It uses the 45nm fabrication technology and is supposedly power efficient and can run on voltages as low as 1.0V, which makes it suitable for mobile devices. It also includes the PowerVR SGX540 graphics chipset for powering all your 3D games and HD videos. Samsung hasn't disclosed the amount of RAM on the Wave but I'm guessing it would be at least 256MB. 512MB seemed unlikely, seeing as how the browser ran out of memory after opening couple of heavy websites.

The Wave has 2GB built-in phone memory, but it is segregated into three parts. 1GB is reserved for the bada applications, which can only be installed on the phone and not on the memory card. 390MB is available for the user files and an absurd 550MB is reserved for messages.

UI & Applications

Samsung Wave is the first phone to run on Samsung's proprietary bada operating system. Yesterday we posted a detailed review of the new OS where we covered all the details from the interface to the applications to the Samsung Store. Although it does have a few teething problems we felt that the OS was still quite polished and capable enough to compete with the best of the smartphone market, even though Samsung intends not to. 


Connectivity

The Samsung Wave is a quad band GSM handset. It also supports dual band HSDPA and HSUPA. It is one of the first phones to support Wi-Fi 802.11n as well as Bluetooth v3.0 specifications. Also available is GPS with digital compass and USB connectivity.

The call quality and network reception was great on the Wave. The loudspeaker was also powerful, so you can hear your calls and ringtones clearly. The vibration strength was good as well.

The web browser on the Samsung Wave is the Samsung Dolfin browser, based on the Webkit engine. As mentioned in the bada OS review, I was very disappointed by the clumsy interface of the browser. Commonly used functions were hidden and lesser used functions such as brightness setting and close button for browser where prominently displayed. The scrolling was a bit haphazard because of use of both traditional scrolling as well scroll bars on the sides.

So often while scrolling down on a page you would hit the scroll bar on the side and end up scrolling upwards. The browser supports tabs but only six at a time and one was unnecessarily assigned permanently to the download manager and not user usable. One of the biggest issues for me, however, was that the text on pages would not fit to the width of the screen causing you to side scroll constantly to read stuff online after zooming in (pinch to zoom is supported, though). This made reading articles on the browser an absolute pain. For those who like reading online, I would suggest either Opera Mobile/Mini or Instapaper app.

Navigation on Wave is powered by the ROUTE66 by NAVTEQ. As I mentioned in the bada review, the maps look dated and aren't as good as Google Maps. Plus the turn by turn navigation is free for a limited time and is a paid service after that. Compare this to Nokia's lifetime free turn by turn navigation and Samsung's solution suddenly seems dated. What's worse is that Google Maps is still not available for bada, not even the Java version. The GPS receiver on Wave is powerful and quickly gets a lock on to the satellites.

Music, Videos and Photos

The music player on the Wave is really nice. It supports most of the popular formats, including MP3, AAC and WMA. In the music player, music is arranged according to various categories with their album art displayed next to their name. In the Album or Artist category, you can swipe left on a name to play all the tracks contained within. You can create playlists on the device or use the present Most Player or Recently Played playlists. Search function is also available but it suffers the same problem as the Contacts search. It will only search for names that include the entered characters at the start of the name and not anywhere within. So entering 'Oom' won't give you 'Boom Boom Pow'.

The music player interface is also nice. You get a nice large album art view and in case the album art is not available for a particular track (and in some cases it was available but the player did not display them) then it will show a nice colorful image instead. There are many such images and they change with every track, so you don't feel like you are looking at the same image throughout an album.

You can tap on the album art to display hidden controls for skipping through the track, track info, repeat, shuffle, etc. Below the album art is the track information and the playback controls. The music player also has several audio equalizer presets and audio effects, as well as Dolby 5.1 Surround effect. There is no manual equalizer option though.

The audio quality on the Samsung Wave is terrific. I tested the phone with Bose On-Ear Headphones and I loved the experience. It's also pretty loud, even with large headphones connected. The loudspeaker is also pretty powerful despite there being only one of it, although we would have liked stereo loudspeaker like on the Samsung Omnia HD, which would have provided a better audio experience while playing videos on the phone. The good thing is that the volume control work even when you lock the phone, just like on the iPhone.

The Wave also comes with an FM radio. The radio has an attractive interface design and is simple to use. It can also record FM radio broadcasts. The reception strength was quite good.

The video player on the Wave is one impressive piece of kit. It's possibly the best video player found on any phone out there right now. Not only can it playback HD videos but it also supports formats like MKV in those resolutions. Another cool feature is the Mosiac search. When you select this option the player automatically creates chapters out of the video file at specific time points and then displays thumbnails, so you can see and then choose to jump to a particular point. This is very handy for large video files and surprisingly even large files don't bog down the search function.

Playing HD videos on the Wave has to be one of the best things I did on a mobile phone. Watching the high resolution videos on the brilliant Super AMOLED display was pure bliss. Also, you don't have to worry about converting or downsizing the videos. Just get a big enough microSD card (we suggest at least 16GB) and then drag and drop. This phone has the capability to single handedly kill all the portable media players out there. And this isn't just lip service.

The image gallery too is impressive. It shows all your images in a grid but for some strange reason also shows the videos here, despite there being a separate video player on the phone (apart from the file manager, which can also play all media files). You can swipe to move through images. Thanks to the fast processor images move very fast. You can double tap the image to view it in 100% zoom or pinch to zoom. The image viewer also has some basic image editing tools, which are quite handy. You can also display images in a slideshow and upload images directly to Flickr, Facebook, MySpace or Photobucket. You can even create a movie with your images.  

Battery Life

The Wave has a 1500 mAh battery. With heavy usage, consisting of several hours of web browsing over EDGE and Wi-Fi, music playback, occasional GPS usage and heavy camera usage, the phone gave me one day of battery life. When I dropped the intensity of my usage I got half a day more of battery life. Considering the kind of features the phone has I feel one day of battery life is fairly acceptable. 

Verdict

The Samsung Wave is priced at Rs. 18,000. Samsung Wave is hands down the best phone you can buy under Rs. 20,000 in India today. It looks great, has an incredible hardware, a gorgeous display, 1GHz processor, smooth fluid interface, good quality camera, 720p video recording and HD video playback. Even if you forget for a while that the Wave is a smartphone that supports full multitasking and support for native bada apps from Samsung's application store, and think of it as a feature phone it still is a great buy for that price. As and when the price falls and the store gets populated with more and better apps it will be an even sweeter deal. It's not perfect though and nor is it an iPhone killer. But for the kind of money you are paying, you are getting much more in return. If you have a budget of 20k, then this is the phone to buy. Well played Samsung.