OG Review: Samsung Wave S8500 (bada OS)

Samsung Wave (S8500) is according to Samsung is one of the two handsets (the other being GalaxyS) that would mark its serious entry into the smartphone space. Last year alone Samsung sold over 40 million touchscreen phones but its a known fact that a majority of them were the low end Corby or Star range devices which aren’t really smart. However, the Wave comes in with Samsung’s Bada OS and some really cool hardware. Powered by a 1GHz processor, super AMOLED display and a HD capable 5MP camera this one is loaded! We spent limited time with the device and here is our review.

Samsung sure knows how to design beautiful looking phones. The Wave is a slim and attractive full touchscreen with an aluminum + plastic body. One of those handsets which gives a real rich feel. The 3.3? Super AMOLED touchscreen is brilliant and certainly the best we have seen till date (update: have handled the iPhone 4 aswell, and this still looks really cool!). Samsung also has an app store for Bada OS that can potentially bring some cool apps / games in the future. The experience playing the pre installed Asphalt 5 on this was great. Accelerometer gaming with the Super AMOLED is a killer combination. Just a small complaint on the placement of the speaker. Placed on the top of the device, when holding the device for gaming in landscape mode it gets completely covered with our fingers and the audio goes out (making us do some weird adjustments in our grip). We have this complaint on the iPhone aswell…. Perhaps a little change in the speaker positioning would be considered in future upgrades.

Overall the Wave is a superb media device with an excellent camera, video recording capabilities and decent music playback. The UI for audio playback is really cool. You can see that in the test video we have captured (below). This device should please a lot of feature phone users, but if you have used the iPhone, any appreciable Android or even a Windows Mobile – you might not be totally blown away with the Bada OS. Bada is capable, finger gestures at places are likeable but the smartness/power that I expect from a super smartphone OS isn’t yet upto the mark (and honestly Samsung wasn’t hoping to do that either). What is exceptionally compelling here is the media player and the UI around it. It should be fun to play around with for many. We have that highlighted on a video aswell.

Though we didn’t measure fully, but the battery life felt average (with good usage of the camera and music it lasts a day).

Bada OS

BADA was seen as me-too effort for long time until we actually met the company exec and tried to understand what they are extremely upto. As we are now informed, Bada is a upgraded, developer friendly and much more mature form of the proprietary OS that Samsung runs on the Corby / Star series touch screens. Wave (S8500) being the first handset powered by the bada OS has managed to sell in large numbers and Samsung believes that the level of customization, flexibility and cost benefit that Bada OS gives them is much needed for them to penetrate the feature phone market and grab a piece of the market there. Having said that, they do not intend to compete with Android / Windows Phone 7 or iOS in the premium smartphone space.

.

The keyboard layout is little frustrating as the Fullstop (.) isnt on place along with the alphabets and that requires me to hit the symbol button after every sentence to just end with a. Adding to my frustration is the save/send button on the lower left corner when typing memos/sms which i end up pressing accidentally instead of the symbol button to insert a fullstop. Guess my concerns are more because of the iPhone experience I have had, however I certainly expect samsung to improve the onscreen qwerty (though its pretty decent compared to a few symbian based touchscreens we have used). The accelerometer worked flawless and gave no troubles except for some occassional hickups during typing memos while we are unable to reproduce or understand completely given the limited time we have spent with this handset. The notifications bar on the top is a gem, and we genuinely liked it (its looks inspired by Android OS, but hey it doesnt matter till it works good). It shows incoming messages, a quick toggle for WiFi / Bluetooth and Silent mode which is certainly like bringing the sbsettings for jailbreaked iPhones to the Bada OS. Thats certainly a smart move!

One thing about the Wave / bada OS that we came across was the lack of complete backup facility. Though you can backup / restore the contacts, calendars and data, the SMS messages can’t be synced on the PC currently. Small frustrations like unable to open a new SMS from the notifications bar if you are already reading a sms (gives an error: sms already open) or if you try doing a preview of the image you just clicked an irritating error that says ‘Try Again’ popus up. And the low memory error that showed up once in a while asking us to close open applications wans’t uncommonly pleasing either. Not a deal breaker, but little frustrations at times, we are hoping Samsung would rollout some good firmware upgrades in coming weeks. There is a little thing in the emailing app as well which doesn’t let you send emails while downloading them. As the OS matures we certainly hope it will handle such situations much better!

I jotted down some thoughts about Samsung Wave on the device itself and found myself banging my head on the desk when I realised that when emailed to myself, those memos arrive in some .vnt format . Apart from that the word limit on the memos also annoys me, the notes on the iPhone perhaps has spoiled me, but seriously – something as basic as a notes/memos should have been sorted right.

At best the bada OS is a pro feature phone software that is built over the same OS / UI that we have seen on the Corby / Star / Monte. There are things in the Wave that we love and ofcourse some scope for improvement that we see. Our overall opinion however remains positive.

Sample pictures from the Samsung Wave

Sample HD video from Wave on youtube