Samsung S8500 Wave preview, Price, pictures, Details, model specifications
Enter a new platform. With a boom. With a bang. A Bada kind of bang. Another of the big guns wants to play by their own rules. Samsung’s second spot in global market share was hard fought but it will be a while before they as much as wish the same for the Bada. They’ve been a consistent innovator over the last couple of years but getting baby Bada up and running must be quite a challenge.
Samsung S8500 Wave Price سعر سامسونج إس 8500
اسعار الموبايلات
و مميزات المحمول و عيوب الجوالات Mobiles Prices
The Samsung S8500 Wave is Bada’s carrier vessel and it certainly looks interesting. It seems to have the right thing to make it newsworthy: slim profile and an absolutely gorgeous screen. But is it enough to make it a success?
Over the past years new touchscreen platforms have been spreading like wildfire but not all of them have managed to catch on as well as their developers must have been hoping. Android fares well but still hasn’t quite overcome its growing pains, while the well settled Symbian platform is still coming to terms with touchscreen.
اسعار الموبايلات و مميزات المحمول و عيوب الجوالات Mobiles Prices
Update 05 March: We received a second Wave unit after this preview was originally published. The new sample had a properly working camera and comes with the final design of the product (some slight changes). We’ve updated most of this article to match the more recent device. We’ve replaced the photos and the screenshots plus we’ve added new sections on thecamera and the preinstalled applications. Have a look around!
Samsung S8500 Wave Price سعر سامسونج إس 8500
Samsung S8500 Wave at a glance
- General:GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS 1900/2100 MHz, EDGE class 10, HSDPA 7.2 Mbps and HSUPA 2 Mbps
- Form factor:Touchscreen bar
- Dimensions:10.9 mm thin
- Display:3.3″ 16M-color Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with 16:9 aspect ratio and 480 x 800 pixels resolution, scratch-resistant glass surface
- Platform: Bada OS
- CPU: 1 GHz processor
- Memory: 2GB internal memory, microSD card slot
- Camera: 5-megapixels auto-focus camera, 720p video recording
- Connectivity: Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n with WPS support, Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP, standard microUSB port, GPS receiver with A-GPS, 3.5mm audio jack
- Misc: Accelerometer for screen auto rotate, proximity sensor for screen auto-turn-off, ambient light sensor, FM radio with RDS, DivX/XviD support, multi-touch input and pinch-zooming gestures
- Battery: 1500 mAh battery
The S8500 Wave is among the best spec’d Samsung phones we’ve seen and it seems every aspect of the overall performance will have to pull its weight. Samsung are keen to focus attention on the young Bada OS, and that might as well bear future fruit. However, if the young platform fails to perform as expected, its shortcomings will be harder to forgive.
In the geeks’ world 720p video recording and 1 GHz CPU are probably the best remedies for a few usability issues. However they rise the cost of the device and that in turn prevents some people from purchasing it. And in a market where smartphones come in all tastes and flavors you really want to get you device in as many pockets as possible.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves and make hasty conclusions. We’ll hopefully know more about how Samsung will pitch the first Bada phone to the users so let’s waste no more time. Join us after the jump for the hardware inspection.
Samsung S8500 Wave Price سعر سامسونج إس 8500
Design and construction
Under the display we find the only three hardware keys on the Samsung S8500 Wave front panel. The Call and End knobs are either side of the menu key. Those are all large enough and with good press, so no usability issues are to be expected.
Whether or not you will like the transition between touchscreen and hardware keys is another question but it doesn’t have a straight answer.
User interface: TouchWiz just got smarter
We guess it’s fashionable to roll out new operating systems. Google stepped up with Android, Nokia are making a new start in touchscreen with the Maemo, HTC have gone a step backwards with the Brew Mobile (is this an operating system at all?). So, it was about time Samsung introduced their own OS as well. Meet the Bada OS.
Text input
Capacitive touchscreens usually won’t give you handwriting recognition but the S8500 Wave is among the few exceptions. It certainly doesn’t have the largest screen possible but handwriting recognition is there. As expected, you can hardly draw more than one character at a time but that’s still something!
If you prefer typing to drawing, go for the on-screen keyboards. You get two options – a portrait numpad and a landscape full-QWERTY keyboard. Given the not so big screen, the the QWERTY keyboard is not the most comfortable. The keys could’ve been a bit bigger and better arranged – after all, the messages you compose don’t need that much space.
Gallery is smooth and sweet
The gallery or Media Browser, as Samsung call it, is basic – all images and clips are displayed all at once as small thumbs. When you select a file you can see it in either portrait or landscape mode.
Multimedia on the go
Multimedia is certainly a S8500 Wave forte. The brilliant display is great for watching videos. The interface of the video player follows the logic of whole UI. Settings and options are a tap away, otherwise hidden when not needed.
The Samsung S8500 Wave supports DivX/XviD files out of the box. Subtitles are welcome as well. Interestingly, you can search for a specific scene using the “Mosaic search” feature. It breaks the clip down to 16 or 36 parts and displays the first frame of each to help you find the scene you’re looking for.
A promising 5-megapixel sharpshooter
The second Samsung S8500 Wave unit we accommodate at our office turned out a pre-marketing sample as well. However, this one has an operational camera along with the previously missing camera key.
The Samsung S8500 Wave is capable of taking 5 megapixel photos and capturing 720p videos.
The S8500 camera viewfinder is quite reminiscent of company’s recent cameraphones. The comfortable interface is nicely touch-optimized and has all you need on the two vertical bars on each side of the viewfinder.
Video recording
The Wave captures 720p videos. Like the Sony Ericsson Vivaz, the S8500 Wave features continuous autofocus during video recording, which allows it to act just like a dedicated video camera.
Samsung are still mum on the video frame rate. Our unit outputs videos at 30fps but under closer inspection of those, there seemed to be only 24 unique frames while the 6 other were duplicates.
But having a steady 24fps is actually a good thing as it provides for a relatively smooth playback. After all, big screen movies are all shot as 24 fps. The Samsung Omnia HD was also trying out for a 24fps output but it hardly reached that with its videos running around 20-22 fps.
All-you-can-eat connectivity
Smartphones are usually well-heeled in terms of connectivity and the Samsung Wave is no exception: all contemporary means of data transfer are supported.
All kinds of network connectivity are at the user disposal – GPRS, EDGE and 3G with HSDPA (7.2Mbps) and HSUPA (2.0Mbps). The GSM/EDGE networking of course comes in quad-band flavor and the 3G in dual-band – 900/2100MHz.
The Wave is the first mobile phone to support the new Bluetooth version 3.0. Naturally, A2DP is also supported. To activate Bluetooth (and Wi-Fi), you can use the dedicated control hidden in the notification area on top of the screen.
The S8500 also packs a standard microUSB port. You can choose from 4 connection modes – Media player, PC Internet, Mass storage and Samsung Kies. Samsung Kies is the new software used to connect your Samsung mobile phone to a computer. Interestingly, in mass storage mode the phone mounts its internal memory (2 or 8 GB, depending on the device) and not the memory card inside it.
Wi-Fi with WPS is also at hand. WPS stands for Wi-Fi Protected Setup and it’s a hassle-free way to pair a wireless device with your secured network. As long as your wireless router supports the feature, pressing the dedicated button on it allows it to pair with the Samsung Wave.
Samsung S8500 Wave Price سعر سامسونج إس 8500
Web browser
Samsung S8500 Wave packs a Webkit-based Samsung Dolphin Browser 2.0. You can have multiple pages opened at the same time and we guess the browser is supposed to support Flash – there’s a dedicated setting for it. However, the browser of our unit didn’t work properly so we can’t confirm Flash video support.
The web browser interface is reminiscent of the Samsung S8000 Jet. There’s multi-touch support, so you can make use of the pinch-zooming feature.
You can also double tap a block of text or an image and the handset will automatically zoom in on it. Another double tap and you are back to the previous zoom level.
The web browser also offers kinetic scrolling and fullscreen view mode. The lack of auto-complete when typing the address of already browsed websites is a letdown, though.
Applications
The System Manager was the first telltale sign the Wave is actually a smartphone. It consists of three tabs. The first one shows the battery info, while the second and the third inform you on the CPU usage and the memory status, respectively. Along with the CPU usage you can also see the currently running apps and you can start the Application manager.
