Included in the menu is Social Hub, an attempt to integrate social networking functions into the handset. It works, but all it does is group your Facebook, Twitter, e-mail and text message functions on a single page – you'll need to open each function individually to access your updates, unlike Motorola's Motoblur or Sony Ericsson's TimeScape, which do a very good job of grouping all your updates together. You can pull all your contacts info in from your Facebook and Twitter accounts too, though the method of doing so can be a bit convoluted.
The Social Hub
Call quality is perfectly fine though, with the speaker going loud enough to make your caller heard even next to a busy road. There's video calling too but while there's the potential for the incoming picture to look really good on the OLED screen, in use it very much depends on the quality of the original video, and poor picture and signal mean that your pics will look as blocky and stilted as usual.
E-mail accounts are easy to set up, requiring just address and password in most cases. The onscreen Qwerty keyboard is a decent one too, with the smallish keys helped greatly by the sensitive touchscreen and useful tabs on the main keyboard such as @ and .com However, bizarrely, the keyboard seems to revert to an older, less user-friendly version in some contexts.
Internet access is fast using Wi-Fi broadband or HSDPA 3G (7.2Mbps) and the screen's multi-touch capability comes into its own when pinching to zoom web pages. Pages generally render well, and one touch brings up a menu allowing you to search, find bookmarks, view multiple pages, search text and filter out the images if you need to. It's intuitive to use but although it allegedly supports Flash video, we couldn't actually get it to play any. The YouTube app on board worked fine however.
Watching video downloads is a joy on the Wave’s crisp screen. There are three options to expand the film to fit the frame of the screen and also three options to set the colour tone. The choices of warm, normal and cold just seem to heighten the red tones in the former, and the blue tones in the latter. Formats are well served too, with MPEG4, H.264, WMV as well as DivX and XviD all catered for.
Browsing looks good, but Flash didn't work
The music player is nicely laid out, with a range of additional options appearing when you tap the screen, including virtual surround sound, shuffle and track info. MP3, AAC, WMA and WAV files all sound pretty good through the supplied headphones too, which include noise isolating grommets. If you need to upgrade, the 3.5mm headphone jack neatly located at the top of the phone is a boon. The FM radio with RDS worked well and you can record directly from it too.
COMMENTS
But..
But.. the point for Samsung is that they were shipping out shedloads of phones with their own OS anyway in addition to all the Android, Symbian and Windows ones that they do.
I think that if you're shipping all those units anyway, opening up the OS and allowing third party developers seems like a no-brainer and pretty low risk approach.
I have actually seen one
My friend got one last week. Forget the £320, that's unlocked. She paid £40 on a not very expensive contract. The 3GS was £200ish on the same contract, so a phone like this is clearly going to help people who don't want to (or can't) spend silly money on a phone.
She doesn't care about app stores. The fact it can run an app at all is a big step up from the usual dumbphones people were buying 18-24 months ago. There is a built in browser, facebook and twitter app, wifi, gps... that's enough for most people to start with.
I don't know about screen tech, but to my eyes, the screen was better than my 3GS. Perhaps I was swayed by the brightness, but everything seems vivid and solid.
It was also responsive, decent camera, flash etc. It made me re-evaluate spending so much on an iphone 4 tbh. Yes, the iphone series might be decent enough phones, but are they worth such a high premium?
Questions
This is a new OS so some more details would be useful. How do you sync it to get your data on there? Is there a desktop sync app? Is it Windows only? How do you backup/restore the phone? How are OS updates covered? Can you apply minor patches OTA or do you have to download everything to a PC and run it from there?
Surely these are the sort of basic things anyone would need to know before considering a phone with a brand new OS?
Bada Bing
So... is the search engine on it by Microsoft thus giving us Bada Bing?
Sorry, someone had to do it...
Adjectivitis
"The large 3.3in Super AMOLED screen promises 16 million colours and is as sharp and clear as you could wish for."
So it's a large 3.3in screen, as opposed to a normal one? Certainly, as opposed to the 3.5-4in screens that are available on other high-end mobiles? (Given that it's 15:9, I'd argue that it's a *small* 3.3in screen, compared with, say, a 480x320 screen with the same diagonal.) Not that there's anything wrong with 800x480, but it's not "large" by any useful measure.
As for "sharp and clear", that seems unlikely. I believe it's a PenTile layout - which for many people is fine, but for some of us is something we'd rather avoid, partly because of the colour speckles and partly because it's *not* as sharp as a WVGA triple-stripe screen.
Jus' the facts, please, not misleading commentary. If every other phone on the market had a 2.5" QVGA screen, these adjectives wouldn't be a problem - but the market has moved on.
