Rogers Samsung Wave review

Samsung, who’s been a contender in the mobile and smartphone market for some time, has recently kicked it up a notch.  Their line of Android based Galaxy S phones, which have launched on multiple carriers internationally, have been getting great reviews.  Just a week or so ago they announced their Galaxy Tab, a 7 inch tablet also running Android, which is due to hit multiple markets by the time November rolls around.

With all this Android love, one has to ask “What’s up with this Samsung Wave?”

After trying it out for a week, I was still left asking the same question.

Out Of The Box

The industrial design of the Wave is actually quite nice.  The body is comprised mainly of dark grey brushed metal, with glossy top and bottom caps, and has an appropriate heft when holding it.  To be completely honest, it actually feels like a higher end phone than the Galaxy S, which is almost too light and certainly too plastic in its feel.  The phone sports all the usual suspects when it comes to the specs… 1GHz processor, 5 MPixel camera (with LED flash), Micro USB charging (with the same nice sliding cover found on some of the Galaxy S phones), two stage camera button and standard 3.5mm headphone jack.  The Wave also has a gorgeous, albeit small, Super AMOLED screen which is absolutely stunning, and blows away LCD screens.  In fact, I prefer to dial back the screen to about half brightness almost all the time, as the saturated colours can be somewhat jarring.

General Usage

To get it out of the way, the call quality on the Wave is definitely up there.  The phone fits well in the hand when making a call, and the sound quality on both ends is good.  There’s nothing negative to report on what is ostensibly the most important feature on a phone.

Text input is done via an on-screen keyboard that is very reminiscent of the Android keyboard, and though the 3.2 inch screen felt a little cramped for any kind of extended typing, I quickly got used to it.  Having used plain vanilla Android keyboards on similar sized phones, Samsung has done a good job on spacing the keys properly.  The camera on the phone is pretty impressive too.  The still photos are better than average for a smartphone, and the HD video looks and sounds great.  It’s not something you’d ditch your point and shoot for, but in most situations the Samsung Wave will have you covered.

It’s the functionality beyond the phone basics that makes it a curiosity.  The Samsung Wave is the first phone with Samsung’s own operating system, Bada.  If you’ve ever used a Galaxy S phone, it’ll be a quickly recognizable experience, as the OS is very similar to Samsung’s Galaxy S Android phones with the Touch Wiz interface.  The multiple pages of widgets are there, as is the separate paged icons that link to individual applications.  Navigating the Wave was eerily familiar in that sense.

Bada was designed as a smartphone OS, and it does have all the major features that one expects from such.  The web browsing experience was better than I expected, with both double tap and pinch to zoom, and most web pages rendered quickly, and with few errors.  There are multiple options for email, and Samsung has included some decent, but not overly flexible apps for the major social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.

Although Samsung has spent some time developing its own Samsung Apps marketplace, the question is how many developers are really going to develop for the platform.  By hitching their wagon to Android, and in a spectacular fashion, Samsung is sending mixed messages with the Bada OS.  It’s clear that they’re trying to leverage the Samsung Apps across not just their phones, but other consumer electronics, such as televisions, but, like Sony, how many people are loyalists to a hardware manufacturer?  Apple, Google and (soon possibly) Microsoft have huge ecosystems that extend far beyond the phone, into the desktop, media and even gaming.

In The End

Don’t get me wrong, the Samsung Wave is a very nice phone, and reasonably priced. The screen is stunning, and it has great battery life.  Far better than any smartphone available on the market in Canada.  There’s the rub. Since Rogers has it classified as a smartphone, you’ll need a full-fledged data plan to go along with it, and without a strong ecosystem, it’s hard to recommend this over any number of Android phones.  Even if you have to pay a little more up front, the real cost of a phone is in the monthly contracts, and although the Samsung Wave does a good job of showing off Bada, I can’t see it really going anywhere.  If you’re going to be paying for a data plan, you might as well look at a phone that will really make use of it.

The Wave is available on Rogers for $29.99 on a 3-year term here.

It is also available on Bell too, for $29.95 on a 3-year term here.