Source:  1800pocketpc.com

For those who don’t know, Bada is to Samsung what Symbian is to Nokia. It’s their new ecosystem aimed at driving their non-smartphone consumer base away from the standard candy bar or flip-phone configurations and closer to the smartphone market without alienating them in the process. There’s an inherent danger in advancing faster than the market can keep up, hence the big push to design uber-sexy devices with functions that can be learned by a three year-old…and you know what? That’s about all I really want to say about the OS itself. It’s fast. It’s sexy. The screen motion is a lot smoother than any other handset I’ve played with lately – and that’s including quite a few of the high spec handsets. Admittedly I haven’t been able to compare it to the new iPhone4 but whatever you do don’t rely on YouTube for side-by-side comparisons. A considerable amount of the experience is lost in the translation from real-life to the internet to you.

User Experience

I can’t seem to stop saying this, and nor do I intend to, but this is without a doubt the best handset I’ve had the pleasure of using for screen layouts. It starts off with being able to slide the unlock screen in whichever direction you want to unlock it. In comparison to using a PIN it’s less secure. However, if you need extra security you can enable a range of privacy options that starts with just locking the screen via PIN (you still need to do the swipe when waking the phone up though) right through to setting a PIN on your choice of any or all of the options Messages, Files, Logs, Contacts, etc…In comparison with the unidirectional sliding (usually in only one section of the screen) other handsets stick you with, getting into the fun or practical stuff is easier by a long shot. I have to also highlight the absolutely fantastic widget control. The Wave lets you feel like you’re in complete control by having a far more flexible grid arrangement system. It actually feels like you’re the master of the home screen as it allows you to put the widgets wherever you want. MobiCity has once again done an excellent job of bringing an handset into the Australian market that’s not burdened with carrier bloatware. Good effort guys.

With respect to the user interface mentioned above, the Wave operates in much the same format as most other phones these days: Multiple Home screens that can be customised with apps or widgets and an All Programs grid that slides up from the bottom of the screen when you press the now-standard centre button. The version of this on the Wave takes you to the first screen in the app list – handy if you find yourself too far away from home (screen) for comfort. With both the home screens and the app list screens the OS sets as many as needed initially and adding extra screens is very iPhone-like in simply creating them for you as you need them. If, for any reason, you desperately want to have blank home screens in between populated screens Bada will let you do this without a fuss. Not sure why it’s a useful feature but it’s there if you want it.

Where the pure awesome freedom of the UI lets itself down is moving apps to the home screens. For whatever reason, Samsung have elected to go down a path somewhere between the app-driven interface of the iPhone (pre-fourth edition) and the widgety goodness of Android. I consider this to be an interesting design decision because it freezes out a portion of the market who want to be able to control everything about their phone yet at the same time will attract those people who can’t understand why the phone vibrates or the little pictures start to wobble when their finger is held on the icon for five seconds or so. It’s a small issue from someone coming from smartphones and it probably won’t make a difference to anyone who’s not used this type of interface previously.

Build Quality

On top of the free-flowing OS, Samsung has outdone every other mobile with their 100% pure awesome manufacturing and materials. The Wave is uber-sleek and has a solid feel that far surpasses that of the Desire and, yes, even the iPhone on account of having more substantial feel it possesses by virtue of Samsung’s generous use of actual brushed aluminium for the casing. Samsung has used a Super AMOLED 3.5inch screen and it’s only the size that prevents it from being a more serious contender in the real estate department. Samsung could have made it bigger if they’d wanted to but then it would be just another semi-smartphone contender and driven away the key target group Samsung are attempting to harness. It’s also not without possibility that later batches would be shifted to the SLCD screen due to the shortages of AMOLED panels. I adore the build quality on this phone and if this is Samsung’s way forwards across their entire range then my beloved HTCs may drop back to second place.

Cool Features

Remember at the start how I compared the Wave to a simple yet catchy song? Here’s the one feature that’s forehead-slappingly simple: Samsung have ditched the tiny plastic swinging door over the charging port (micro-USB in this case) that is only held on by a thin strip of plastic. These drive me nuts and I suspect it would be enough to send anyone who has extremely short fingernails running away screaming. The Wave has a tiny sliding metal door instead. This serves two purposes. The first is that it keeps dust and other pocket presents out of the phone. The second is that it makes people, well…me, anyway, wonder why they’re the only company doing something that really should be standard in all mobile phones these days.

Other impressive design points are having the loudspeaker mounted on the top edge of the frame. As someone who arrived at the Wave from a JasJam, Blackberry, Magic and Desire, this phone allowed me for the first time in 4-5 years to make calls using speaker without having to flip the phone over, alternating in accordance with who was speaking at the time…and it does it in the most sensible manner ever. Instead of making the call, then taking the phone away from your face, waiting for the proximity sensor to notice you’re not there then you pressing the speaker button, with the Wave you make the call and lay the phone on its back. The motion sensor decides that you want the speaker on and away it goes.

Another significant benefit of having the speaker on the top of the unit is while it automatically engages when you commence a video call (either outward or inward bound) the sound is directed up so you can hear it, not backwards so that the people standing in front of you are the only ones who can hear it clearly. Note that I said ‘when you commence a video call’. That’s right; the front facing video camera looks to be making a comeback. With any luck – and perhaps some good business sense – the telcos will finally drop the price of video calls and make them more accessible. I know many other phones have had front-facing cameras for a while now. However, they’re not been that common on anything other than flip or candybar handsets which, to be honest, weren’t that much fun to make video calls on anyway because of the small screen size and depleted quality of the cameras. Now that the cameras are moving into the feature-phone & smartphone markets video calling becomes a more attractive proposition. Some may see video calling as a massive gimmick, which it is if you haven’t used it, but once you have it becomes horrendously addictive. Try it once. You’ll see what I mean.

While we’re on cameras I’ll briefly mention that the main camera is rated at 5MP and more importantly to consumers these days is the ability to record and playback high-definition content. The quality produced by the camera is above average in video mode and really good when taking still shots. For a handset that’s not really targeted at the camera-toting crowd it does an excellent job. Samsung have an excellent tradition of quality displays and the Wave is no exception. The media playback of both user-produced content and pre-produced media are both a joy to watch. There’s something about the screen that makes all motion feel fluid. Whether it’s moving icons around or watching video, everything has a particularly life-like quality to it.

One of the hardest parts about writing reviews on mobiles – aside from having to give back some awesome examples of technology – is the constant changing from one to the next and managing to carry all my existing data over. This is especially so when moving from one phone OS to another. As Android stores the majority of the handset data locally but messaging in the cloud, the switch was a lot easier than I’d imagined it would be. The only things I’ve ever really had issues with in moving from one handset to the next are text messages. Having had the Wave for a while now I’ve still not quite worked out how to do it but most people aren’t as sentimental as I am and can probably live with simply copying all the images and files but leaving the SMS messages behind. There may be a way to back up the SMS into XML and move them across in the same way as some Android apps allow you to but I didn’t find it in the time I had the Wave.

Social Networking

In keeping with the current push to centralise all the social networks and communications flows in one place Samsung has given us Social Hub. Social links in to the usual suspects – Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc… and throws in instant messaging to differentiate it from the pack. It’s a lot like all the other unifying social networking apps on the various platforms and doesn’t really bring anything new to the table. However, it is still a solid application even if it does highlight one of my minor quibbles with this phone. That particular quibble is loading times. It has them. It’s not entirely unbearable but you’ll notice the absence of the seamlessness found in almost all other areas of the phones.

Back in the day – about 4-6months ago, lol – unifying the social networks was an addition to the handset to target the younger audience. For better or worse it’s now in danger of becoming just another app. This puts at risk fantastic ecosystems like MotoBlur that do so much more than provide a constant stream of information…hmmm….on second thoughts that’s actually pretty much all they do but there’s something more magical about how MotoBlur functions in comparison to Social Hub and even TimeScape (on the Sony Ericsson Android handsets). TimeScape sits at the other end of the spectrum from MotoBlur and, like Social Hub is a widget and quite minimalist instead of taking over the phone in the manner of the former.

Quibbles

Going back to quibble-land for a moment, another one was so out of place that it necessitated the scratching of my mystified noggin. Everything about the Wave is so wave-like it’s as though development ended, someone played with the phone and said something like “It feels like your playing in water”. Given that ‘Liquid’ had already been taken, Wave seems a logical next choice. Continuing this theme of fluidity, the rotation of the screen from portrait to landscape is easily the best I’ve seen on a phone. It politely waits a moment to make sure you’re not just shaking the phone and then everything rotates so smoothly I can’t even find a simile or metaphor to describe it. However, referring again to that head-scratching puzzlement, the screen doesn’t rotate in every app. This in itself is fine if the app doesn’t need the landscape keyboard but when it does, having to type messages and status updates on the tiny portrait keys is almost scream-inducing… as is the distinct lack of auto-correction or word selection list options. They managed to make cursor movement, selecting text and cut/copy/pasting workable enough. Even so, it can still take a few frustrating minutes to let everyone know that you’re happy with life and looking forward to catching up with Bec and Benson later after work. The lack of rotation is not a show-stopper and with the requisite amount of practice making the keyboard work for you instead of against becomes a lot easier. Still, it doesn’t quite make sense to me to allow only some of the apps to rotate but not others. Maybe future versions of the various OS’s will have per-app permissions for landscape or portrait rotation or the apps themselves will have the option and force the OS to rotate.

There was one feature I didn’t test because I didn’t know it was there until it was time for the phone to go back was the TV-out. This port is cunningly disguised as it doubles as the headphone socket. Having this feature does make the headphones somewhat of a proprietary nature. This locks you into what comes with the box and whatever else Samsung offer as accessories if the boxed headset isn’t to your liking. Fortunately the boxed pair is quite good; easily comparable to the Sennheiser set I use on my Desire, iPhone and Magic (the latter via the HTC USB adaptor). The Wave’s music playback quality is also quite high. In actual fact, the standard of sound quality across all mobiles is so good that for a mobile to be above average it would really need to blow your mind in a $1000+ headphones kind of way. With this in mind, the Samsung Wave will happily satisfy everyone except those people who use $1000+ headphones.

Quite a few posts have been found on various forums relating to the “known fault” that occurs when non-Samsung headphones are used in the latest models of Samsung phones. Despite it being stated in the manual and also all over the spec pages on the Samsung website, there are some who still contend that this is a fault with the handset. It’s not, and if anyone says otherwise point them in the direction of the online PDF manual and suggest they do a word-search for ‘headset’. It will be about the fourth or fifth search result. The headset has slightly different ‘rings’ on the standard 3.5mm jack. Differences between the rings on the jack can be found on a number of different models as the manufacturers use them to implement different control mechanisms on the headset cable. Don’t let this put you off the supplied unit as they are fantastic. Even my kitten thinks so

More Specs and Conclusion

Supporting all these gorgeous, fluid animations and heavy feature-set is a 1500mAh battery. The battery is worth noting because even though the Wave is not a true smartphone (in as much as the productivity apps for things like MS Office don’t appear to be available) it does share many of the same features and abilities. The battery kept the phone going for entire days with me under heavy use. I had to charge it at night, as with just about every other phone on the market, but I didn’t need to reach for the charger by 12:30 as I’ve had to with other phones of a similar nature.

So now I get to the part where I need to try and fit the Samsung Wave into the line-up of currently available mobiles in terms of what consumers are looking for. This is something that I’ve been struggling with for the last few days, racking my brain and going back through experiences with other phones. In keeping with the head-slapping simplicity that has been my time with the Wave I think it fits in around the iPhone market. It offers Super AMOLED screen quality and animations that are second to none. Everything is easily controlled through the three main buttons at the base of the screen. It’s intuitive. It’s amazingly sleek and feels fantastic in your hand. The only things separating it from the iPhone is the slightly smaller screen size and the absence of a market with 3^rd party apps. Acknowledging that the App Store is a massive part of the iPhone experience, Samsung has put the call out to developers to start working on apps for Samsung’s handsets. There’s no market accessible through the Wave as I had it. I would expect Bada to attract enough of a following in the coming years to warrant its own app store. Though let’s face it: a mobile’s not a self-respecting mobile if it doesn’t have an app store to back it up these days.

Overall I’ve really enjoyed using this phone to the point where I really don’t want to give it back. As per the above, Samsung is targeting people who want something like an iPhone without having to actually get one. My experiences with Samsung products have always been good. The various devices I’ve owned from them have always been solid, reliable and always on the aesthetically pleasing side. There’s not been any blinding flash of inspiration as to how I can rate phones in any meaningful way so for the Wave I’m just going to give a simple two thumbs up.