Samsung Wave Review Part 2: Internet, email, apps and multimedia, special features, conclusion

Here it is, guys: Part two of the much delayed Samsung Wave review. This covers Internet, email, apps, special features, and conclusion. I'm so sorry I've been so busy with work and at the same time down with the bug, it's only now I found the time to actually finish this. Hope this review would still help. Holidays are here!

Internet
This is where bada falls completely short. While the internet browser does support flash seamlessly, it has a lot of shortcomings. First up, you might not be able to forgive it if it can only open one tab at a time. Shall you brave to open another, you risk running out of memory and bada will close your widgets on your homescreen. When that happens, you might end up having an empty homescreen and needing to reset again. I particularly dislike this behavior so I often just end up with one tab opened at a time.

You might also find another troubling behavior when your transfer speeds slow down. While loading the page, you might end up getting a message that the page you are trying to download is too large and that you have ran out of memory instead of just stopping page render like most browsers.

Pinch zooming is supported though. You will find this feature very useful as you will only need to pinch the page. Text reflow however is poorly implemented and may cause you some minor inconvenience.

The web browser for bada is called Dolfin. This is very different from the android brewed Dolphin browser.

Overall, I call the internet experience in bada / wave lightweight. If you have tried iOS internet or high-end android internet, you will be scratching your head with the the wave's execution.

Email
You can have as many email accounts as you like although I'm not sure if it's me or the browser, but I can't seem to have more than one gmail account registered as I have a gmail account logged in there.

Upon registering an account, wave will download your 50 most recent emails. Every time you ask the email client to download emails, it will download exactly 50 emails, regardless of their age.

That would have been just fine if you can tick "set all emails as read" but as it stands, you cannot. You will have to open each email to have them marked as read. This is something I find pretty annoying. There isn't even a link or button to mark the email as read without opening them.

Also, since you have new unread messages, there will always be a new email icon on the notification bar, which basically just stays there unless you've cleared your inbox. Luckily, when a new message arrives this gets hidden in favor of the new message notification.

There is also no unified inbox experience, which is an opportunity missed. UNIFIED INBOX means all your email accounts messages is collected in one inbox. Not sure if you will find this good or bad: Bad because you would need to switch accounts to check mails. Good since you won't have your stuff mixed up. But for me, I'm all for unified inbox.

Over-all likes: Pinch to zoom is very useful, browser supports flash

Over-all dislikes: No unified inbox, you would need to switch email accounts. Text reflow is not very well done, laggy internet experience, need to open each email to be marked as read

Apps & Multimedia
From what I see before I left bada, its apps have a plausible future. Right now, there are a handful of games that feature 3d graphics and promising game play. There aren't that many games yet, but the ones available are bound to keep you busy while waiting for new ones.

Apps

As much as I have loved some games in bada, I was also pretty disappointed with some. For starters, the apps for twitter and fb are severely underpowered. In the facebook app, you can't chat with your facebook friends, like in ios. Managing your inbox is also such a chore, and you don't get notifications. I was told that the notifications for facebook should appear on my phone's notification panel, but I've never experienced that. The twitter client in the other hand does not allow you to reply on your mentions. Their lack of functionality always sees me switching to mobile web versions. I believe both the twitter and fb clients are made by samsung themselves and only sanctioned by fb and twitter.

I also downloaded a "stress-relieving game" that takes a picture from your library and places it on a caricature body that you can poke and bully. Once the app starts searching your sd card, your phone either loses all of its ram, which closes all the widgets in your homescreen, or the app just closes. You can't choose phone memory pictures only, the app can't be configured. Not exactly stress relieving.

Multimedia

This is where The Wave recovers grace and makes itself such a worthy purchase. For 19K and going lower, you get a 3.3" S-AMOLED screen with a WVGA screen resolution (800 by 480). Videos and movies will love this phone. S-AMOLED offers the best sunlight legibility and color vibrance / contrast.

Camera

Let's take the camera first. Typical Samsung smartphone 5MP camera is installed on this phone, as such, it misses out a few pixels--compared to the industry standard present in the iPhone 4. This simplye boggles me as this is the same camera sample size they've used since the OMNIA i900. This is also the module installed on the Galaxy S, I presume, though the one on the Wave will inevitably perform better due to a LED flash affixed on the unit.

Pictures taken by the Wave looks nice especially when viewed on the phone, but transferring them to the PC will make them lose contrast and color, this is because the PC I am and most people are using is equipped with an LCD and not an LED screen. On print, the pictures are estimated to take more contrast. This makes the Wave a good testing tool for photographers. Instead of rushing to print the picture you've post-produced, it is a good idea to send them first to your Wave or any S-AMOLED device to test how you've done with your photos' contrasts--as this is most likely how the contrast would appear on print. Unfortunately, color reproduction on the Wave is a bit too exaggerated, so practice caution if you are to use to check for color.

The user interface is very friendly and familiarly Samsung. The one feature I like most is the tap to focus. Just tap anywhere to focus and press the hardware shutter key to take the picture. Taking pictures is also fast, the camera starts up fast and breaks in-between shots are also short.

If I have any complains on the Wave's camera, it is the loss of detail when you take pictures on dimly lit occasions. Turning on the flash does not help either as it drowns your targets with too much LED flash. Otherwise, it is a top-notch 5 MP camera with a fast start-up and focusing time.

Video

The video recorder can take a 720p video, which is the most high-res you can get these days. This is a unique feature for the price range the Wave is at. Normally at this price rate, video recording can only go as high as VGA at 30 fps. You may however want to note that the video is, be it 720p does not go higher than 24 fps. This is acceptable, though marketed wrongly. Continuous auto focus like on the Vivaz and the X10 is not here though, just the normal focus.

Multimedia: Music Player

As per a test conducted by Mobile Review, audio playback on the wave is not top-notch, though by my judging, it is pretty average--not the best solution but decent enough and introspecting, there are some sounds I can hear on the X10 that was not audible on the Wave. Sure that might seem like a cause for alert, but nothing really serious or deal-breaking in magnitude.

The Music Player UI is very intuitive and mimics much of what has been done on iDevices, at portrait it is your standard music player, stuffed with the usual next, previous, play/pause, loop and shuffle controls. It has, interesting enough, a toggle for 5.1 ch, which makes for something good on video playback but not much on music playback. Flipping it to landscape will give you a similar coverflow interface, only instead of cover flow, it will give you a disc flow. Yep, disc flow: discs that feature the cover art on your stuff. It looks fun, especially how smooth it all runs, but just like Apple's cover flow, I don't find it very useful unless I want to play a whole album. I must commend the music player interface as it does the mimicry so well that the intreface won't alienate.

Time for some bad news, I've tested it time and again even after I updated my software, the music shuffle is very much like Sony Ericsson's. This means that certain tracks are repeated and some are omitted in favor of the repeated tracks. This kind of poor shuffle algorithm really puzzles me.

As I also mentioned earlier, the music player can also be toggled to play, stop, or skip the track by pulling down the notification bar. Same thing works for the FM radio--which is basically just an FM radio so I won't delve into it anymore.

Video Player

If anything, the extensive video playback capability built into the Wave really makes it feel such and expensive device, aside from the already mentioned brushed steel body. This thing supports almost all known codec to man, including Matroska (.mkv), albeit still needs some polishing. The only thing it doesn't play are Apple codecs, which we can assume is because to Apple's policies on its codecs.

The overall experience here quite differs from the iPhone/iPod Touch in a sense that the video player can only remember a bookmark for one video unless you create a bookmark for it, which is available under options. Another useful functionality is the Mosaic Search which is unique to the Wave (not even Samsung's Galaxy S has this)--this nifty feature scans the whole movie / video you are playing and gives you scenes taken from the scan--kind of like chapters on a DVD film. Thing is, the Mosaic rendering takes more than ten seconds and once you click on the mosaic and realized that is not the one scene you want to see and you go on to do the mosaic search again, your Wave will need to re-render the mosaics, which is quite a waste and, for me, defeats the thought of making it easier for you to search.

The video player also offers on-board changing of brightness and color temperature (warm will give it a reddish tint, neutral, and cool will give it a bluish tint). The video player, unlike the one in Galaxy S, does play at portrait mode, which is kind of pointless.

Another nifty feature of the video player is how you can "lock" the keys of your phone, meaning, video playback will ensue, but the keys are locked so you can't accidentally exit the film in case you press a key by accident.

Over-all likes: Lovable video playing capabilities that supports dozens of popular codecs, key-lock mode, familiar iPod like interface, nifty music dropdown on the notification bar

Over-all dislikes: Mosaic search could have been better, treble-y music playback needs a rework

Other features

Before we wrap up this review, let me mention some special features that make the Wave a standout among the smartphone crowd or totally screws it up:

1. Etiquette pause - This is much like HTC's face down to mute function, though I've seen this first on Samsung back in the Omnia days. This is very nifty during meetings and times you don't want to be disturbed much.

2. Bluetooth 3.0 and Wifi b/g/n - This is worth noting down as these are the latest connectivity modules available on the market and Wave has them. Bluetooth 3.0 ensures better bluetooth device connectivity and wifi n gives you faster data transfer across a wifi network.

3. Samsung Kies - is a mixed bag. For one, it is quite slow and buggy--the forgivable kind, and can be totally bypassed unless you are installing apps. For another, it is very helpful when transferring media. Upon sensing that you are transferring stuff that your phone can't play, it will offer to convert it, and this saves much time.

4. A detailed manual - Samsung spent time on their manual to make it easy for you to familiarize with bada, though I skipped reading this since I have learned much about the interface by reading the reviews anyways, I find their manual very nice, organized, and informative.

5. Mobile AP - Here you can turn your phone into a mobile router and share your 3G internet connection to 3 other devices. Nifty, right? And is also a complete rip-off of a Froyo functionality, but is a very welcome addition.

Conclusion

Samsung built a baby Galaxy S under the guise of the Samsung Wave. As this is their initial offering for their homegrown smartphone OS effort, they gave it the best care and hardware they could. Come on, 1 GHz Hummngbird CPU, A GPU that produces 90 Million triangles a minute, the best screen technology available, and that sleek metal body--sounds like a cheap deal for PHP19K.

On the software side of things, they incorporated good bits from Android, iOS, and even Symbian to create a smartphone for the masses. bada's goal is to be the smartphone OS for everybody. It does not aim to please the techies; in idea, it competes with the iPhone which is basically--as it is now--the smartphone for everyone with money but what about those who don't? Here is where the Wave beams to everyone, wooing customers by offering the best bang for the buck. Samsung did this by offering a familiar experience and giving it some dash of conveniences not found on the iPhone. And I think at some points they did well, though fail at some points, too.

I would have to criticize the choice of UI fonts and interface color. I think this was mainly done to showcase how S-AMOLED can display real blacks which is really just showing off already. The 1000 messages cap doesn't seem like a dealbreaker in paper, but does well to surprise you how much crippling it is.

On the hardware side of things, the button layout and body design kind of makes me question Samsung's taste. To me, it is still Sony Ericsson who does the best body design by sticking to minimalism--which is were most manufacturers are going these days, the less buttons, the better, and the Wave here looks like it's stuck in mid-2000s with all those buttons and tacky design.

Would I recommend the Wave? Hell yeah, but only if you have not used Android. iPhone users are welcome to try it and they will feel as if they've never left home, although the missing apps would suck, they would have to wait for the app store to grow, unfortunately. People leaving the feature phone arena will feel empowered by the Wave, but don't get carried away, it is still the least flexible among the smartphone OS's around. But with Samsung's continuous success and domination, the future seems bright for bada. And keeping your Wave for two years does not seem like such a bad thing in the end, you would get everything you need from it with software updates coming in a stream that helps keep your phone feeling brand new.