Late last year, Samsung announced their intention to launch their own mobile platform, an ecosystem designed to enable developers to create applications for Samsung mobile devices, which would further enhance the productivity and functionality of phones. Some questioned the viability of bringing yet another mobile platform to an already over-crowded market, but Samsung followed through on their intentions and Samsung bada was born.
The name bada is Korean for ocean, and Samsung claim it conveys the limitless variety of potential applications which can be created for this new system. Which is all well and good but whether developers will want to invest in creating applications for yet another phone platform remains to be seen. Even so, Samsung are confident that bada will deliver something appealing to consumers, and at the recent Mobile World Congress they announced the first mobile phone to run on bada, the Samsung Wave.
In design, the Samsung Wave is very similar to the Vodafone H1, with similar stats in measurements and weight, although the Wave is 2mm thinner. The Wave sports a huge 3.3 inch Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, supporting up to 16 million colours and with a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels. The screen has auto rotate facility and supports multi touch input, which among many benefits makes gaming on the device a much better experience. The screen is covered with a scratch resistant surface, which should help the display remain clear and legible in the day to day knocks and bumps a mobile phone receives. Sitting on top of the bada OS is Samsung’s proprietary TouchWiz user interface, a smart, bright UI that will be familiar to many owners of previous Samsung handsets. One of the features carried over from standard Samsung devices into the Wave is Smart unlock. This nifty feature allows you to unlock the screen from standby and immediately launch into an application by tracing a letter onto the display with your finger. For example tracing an M could launch the music player, T for text messaging and so on.
Speaking of music, the Wave 8500 is a capable music player, and in fact a capable all round entertainment device. The music player supports MP3, AAC, eAAC+ and WMA amongst other formats, whilst the video player on the Wave will play back MP4, WMV, XviD and DivX files. Audio playback is enhanced by the inclusion of DNSe which has been seen in a few top end Samsung devices recently, and there is also a 3.5mm audio jack. The handset includes a stereo FM radio, which also has an FM recording option, too. Should you wish, the Wave supports Bluetooth with A2DP for stereo wireless streaming, avoiding any messy tangles with wires, and in fact the Bluetooth on this handset is the very latest 3.0 variant. There is ample storage space available on the phone for all your media files, with the Wave coming with either 2GB or 8 GB of internal memory, plus memory expansion via MicroSD memory cards up to 32 GB in size.
The Wave also comes with a high quality 5.0 Megapixel camera incorporated, which offers support for autofocus, as well as face, smile and blink detection, to help you get that perfect snap every time. With a built in GPS receiver, the camera can Geotag images with location information, which can be viewed when your images have been uploaded to the web. The Wave is also a capable video recording device, offering high quality video capture, and the LED flash can also be used as a video light for recording in low level lighting conditions.
We’ve already mentioned the inclusion of GPS, and the Wave delivers with aGPS too, which works to locate your position in a faster way by not relying solely on GPS satellites but also uses network triangulation. Google Maps comes pre-installed on the Wave, and there is also a digital compass. Location based services comprise a large number of available apps for established platforms, and these features will be vital for such apps if they are ported to the bada OS.
To cut it as a top end smartphone these days, a device needs to be well connected and here the Samsung Wave also scores well. The phone is a quad band GSM device, offering dual band HSDPA on 900 and 2100 frequencies. The HSPA support allows for downloads at up to 7.2 Mbps and uploads at up to 2.0 Mbps, whilst the WiFi support includes 802.11 b/g/n. If you happen to be in an area that is not 3G enabled, the Wave offers both Class 10 GPRS and EDGE.
For a first device, the Samsung Wave certainly sets a high standard for subsequent bada based handsets. If Samsung do manage to deliver with an appealing set of applications for this new platform, they may just prove the naysayers wrong and make bada devices a viable alternative to the more established smartphone platforms.
The Samsung Wave is expected to release to market in late April 2010.
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8:22 am
The quality of music is just awsome . Wonder what technology they use.
7:11 pm
I have just acquired a Samsung Wave, its a lovely phone but I have a problem, my fingers are large so it is hard to touch the exact key with other touch screen phones you can get a stylus but unfortunately Samsung do not make one and the ordinary one does not work with this type of screen so if anybody knows where I can get one that will work I would be most grateful.
10:44 am
I love this phone but I have the same problem as Victor France. I only have little fingers but I still find that trying to hit the correct letter everytime is time consuming. Any ideas out there?