Hands on With The Samsung GalaxyS & Wave S8500

Now this was one exciting weekend with an opportunity to go hands on with the Samsung Galaxy S and the BADA OS powered WAVE. Both these handsets are just launching in India and Samsung claims these to be their first step to enter the smartphone business in a big way globally!

The first attraction is that – both these phones have a gorgeous Super AMOLED screens and you really need to see it in person to feel it (we haven’t seen the iPhone 4s Retina yet). Both these phones record HD 720p and playback 1080p video, on this display that is surely a treat!  We had an opportunity to interact with an BADA OS Evangelist (Arun) and Sarfaraz Bora who is the product manager for India. More on the BADA OS strategy after the break.

WAVE happens to be the first Samsung phone running the BADA OS (runs a 1GHz processor) and this thing is surely aimed at the higher end of the feature phones (or the lower end of smartphones). Samsung tells us that they aim to upgrade the feature phone market (which has roughly 80% share of mobile) to BADA OS devices. BADA isn’t fully ready with several things like a full backup utility missing, we still have a pretty good OS considering the feature phone market. On a touchscreen, we surely liked this over the Nokia 5xxx touchscreen series and if you noticed, whenever we mentioned Corby, we hoped it came with a better OS. We put this question to Samsung’s product manager in India Sarfaraz and though there are no clear confirmations on camera, the general feel and impress that Samsung gave us at the event suggested that in a year from now we shall see several BADA OS powered devices in the sub Rs 10000 ($200) price range. Samsung shared plans to get even the local Social networks like Ibibo / Bigadda on this, but currently they are trying to get past Orkut’s API it seems.

Feeling much larger in our hand and a bigger, sleeker version of the iPhone 3GS is the Galaxy S. Running Android 2.1 @ 1GHz processor, this one sure did impress us. We spent very little time with the phone but there were no hiccups or notable shortcomings. The only notable thing that came out was the fact that thing thing doesn’t have a Flash along with the camera. We tried out SWYPE keyboard and it looked impressive. We shall shortly have in depth reviews of both these handsets shortly.

Btw: we saw live both the Galaxy S and the WAVE doing TV out via the 3.5mm jack (Samsung used it to project during demos). We also played Asphalt 5 on the Wave at the event and it was projected on the large screen. (Galaxy S also allows wireless streaming to DLNA LCD over WiFi).