Monthly Archives: June 2010

This review is taking a lot longer than I expected because there is a lot to talk about as far as the Samsung Wave is concerned. Besides the stunning hardware (see part two), it is running Bada OS and is the first smartphone to do so. This alone warrants a close look at what it can do and by all accounts it can do a lot.

When you first fire up the Wave you are presented with an interface that looks like any other feature phone setup, but a longer look reveals much more. Some time spent with the phone shows that Samsung has spent a lot of time looking around at the competition and building an operating system which is seemingly trying to capture more than just the consumer market. The hardware and software combined take much of the goodness from competing products and produce a solution which at first glance is too good to be true.

The image below highlights the best features found in smartphones running on competing mobile operating systems and every single one of them is present in the Samsung Wave-

It is clearly apparent that the Wave, and potentially Bada, is special and that Samsung has put a lot of effort into its first Bada OS phone, but what is it really like to use? As the operating system is new I will spend more time than usual demonstrating what it does.

Multi-tasking

Multi-tasking is not present if you read the various online Bada resources and official information, but this confuses me. For example, I can have a third party eBook running and when I leave it the app stays in the same state at the same page. Holding the centre key will bring up a selection of currently running apps and tapping one will take you back to where you left off. However, when I then run another app the eBook is not in the running apps page. It is slightly confusing and it seems to be as though Samsung is taking the Apple route and providing a dumbed down form of multi-tasking rather than a full blown effort.

Home screen

This feature screams Android to me in almost every nuance of the design; you can have multiple home screens which have a background that moves slightly to the left or right when you swipe between them. You can add widgets such as a calendar, emails, birthdays, BBC iPlayer and many more, and the press of a button brings up a table of icons just like Android.

If you tap the edit icon in the top left corner you can then move icons around by holding them and dragging them in exactly the same way you do on the iPhone. Back to Android similarities; dragging down the top bar will offer three large icons to enable and disable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth plus a handy silent icon for meeting etc. It also shows what notifications you have and these are also detailed in the top bar.

PIM

This has always been a contentious area on the latest smartphones; Apple hasn’t got it right yet on the iPhone, but Android has gone some way to making it a usable experience for everyone. Bada sits somewhere in the middle and offers a PIM setup that looks like the kind you would find in a feature phone, but which performs quite well. The calendar is basic and offers a list, day and month view with MS Exchange synchronisation included. Adding a new entry is straightforward enough, but I could not find a way to set alarms by default which is an unnecessary annoyance. For a new appointment you can include a location and participants plus set the standard reoccurrences from 1 day to 1 year.

Contacts allows you to create new entries which include a photo, IM details and just about everything else you should need. Nicknames, VOIP numbers, PTT numbers, Assistant names, children etc. etc. are all there and comprehensive enough to work for serious business people who need to store lots of information for each person. You can also ‘Get Friends’ through Facebook and MySpace.

A task manager is present that allows you to set alarms and standard priorities and will suit those of you who need basic task management. If you need more, you will have to wait until someone develops something more comprehensive.

There is a basic memo app present which offers coloured memo styling and little else. The memos are listed in alphabetical order, but there appears to be no way to search for memos within the app. It feels too consumerist for me, but does what it need to.

The Clock app includes alarms which can be set for a multitude of times, world clocks, a stopwatch and a timer. It is effectively the standard iPhone clock app, but with much more flexible alarm management.

The calculator is basic until you turn the phone on its side and then a scientific version pops up. I am sure I have seen that somewhere before? The keys are just big enough to hit in the scientific view and it just passes my test for when quick calculations are needed. It could be better though.

A Mini Diary is included where you can store daily entries and also capture photos, weather, locations and notes. This reminds me of Awesome Notes on the iPhone and is a very good solution compared to many third party offerings on other platforms. You can also publish entries from the diary to a blog directly from the phone- a super clever idea which could be tweaked on other platforms to make mobile blog posting much easier than it is now. This app won’t be used by everyone, but is nice to have for free.

The default PIM apps are decidedly OK without ever verging on looking like they are designed for professionals. The sad part is that some of them include a great deal of functionality and just need tarting up to look more serious if you know what I mean. They do fall somewhere in between the default  iPhone and Android PIM apps and have the potential to be great if Samsung chooses to pursue development here.

Messaging

The SMS app offers conversation views and standard folder views plus the ability to backup text messages to the memory card. There is a spambox, broadcast messaging option and folder management which is impressive. I have to say that this is the most complete SMS solution I have seen to date and it treats texts like emails which is handy for serious texters.

Now for the all important email. When you choose to set up a new email account you are presented with a list comprising of Exchange ActiveSync, Google, Yahoo!, Hotmail and Others. The setup process was very quick for my Exchange account and it has merrily grabbed my contacts, calendar entries and emails ever since. The email display is again verging on being to consumer targeted, but you get a lot of option for each email. For example pressing the bottom settings icon brings up options to print via Bluetooth, backup email, change the display mode, add to contacts, forward with or without attachment and of course to delete. It is pretty complete, but the emails do not appear as they would on a desktop. There appears to be no HTML support built in, but I may be wrong on that- I have found no option to allow such presentation.

Social Networking

Social hub is a curious app which Samsung talks about a lot in its marketing literature. You can use it to compose new emails, texts, social networking messages and the like and once you get used to it is a much quicker way to communicate than previously. It also acts as a way to access each of the apps that relate to these services. I will let Samsung explain how it works because I can’t quite get the words out- “Keep up-to-date with communities in your hands with email, Instant Messaging and SNS. Social Hub integrates contact information from all your online accounts, so you can easily find your contacts and select the best way to communicate. Social Hub’s synchronised calendar lets you manage your schedule by integrating events from all your online accounts in one convenient display.” webOS anyone?

These dedicated apps are not too bad and I quite like the Twitter client. If only I could find a way to post photos and locations? Hopefully these will be included in a future update.

The Facebook app is much more complete and offers most of the functionality you would expect such as photo uploading. I would say that it compares very well to the iPhone and Android Facebook clients.

Data Entry

OK, you may well be aware of my thoughts on touch screen data entry and they haven’t changed with the Wave. It offers landscape support in all views, but there is no haptic feedback and the keys are quite small. I have to say that this one area is a letdown when the rest of the operating system is considered and Samsung would do well to jump on it quickly and get it sorted.

My personal preference for hardware keyboards aside, the iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile data input methods are better and the Bada setup compares closely to Symbian S60 5th Edition i.e. not good at all.

Navigation

Navigation Bada is extremely fulfilling and reminds me very much of the iPhone in the way you sweep through pages of apps and use multi-touch to increase and decrease the size of photos. TouchWiz UI 3.0 is a similar solution to HTC Sense, but one which does not feel like an add-on. All in all this is the best touch experience I have known on any phone and it rivals the iPhone very closely.

GPS

The A-GPS works well in Google Maps and got a lock very quickly, but the included navigation app has not found my current location once so far. I have read about this problem elsewhere and so it appears to be a bug, a pretty big one for a navigation app. With luck more solutions will become available, but until then (or if Samsung sort out the problem) Google Maps is your only option. This feature in inconclusive at this time.

Samsung Apps

Apps are of course a major feature for any smartphone operating system and Bada needs to do well in this area to compete. Samsung Apps is included which allows you to purchase and download apps on the phone itself, but the current library is a little shallow. Here are the numbers I could find-

Entertainment: 26 items
E-Book: 20 items
Games: 35 items
Health/Life: 46 items
Music/Video: 1 item
News: 1 item
Navigation: 2 items
Reference: 12 items
Social Networking: 1 item
Utilities: 18 items

The news gets better because some big titles are already available. Astraware has released Sudoku, Board Games and Solitaire already (all retailing for £3.00 each). Let’s Golf, Real Football 2010, Dungeon Hunter, Homerun Battle and UNO are other notable releases already available. Let’s Golf is excellent on the Wave and I would argue almost as good as on the iPhone- when a larger screened Bada device becomes available gaming will be even better.

The fact that some of the big publishers have already jumped onboard is likely down to the general success of mobile apps as anything else, but they obviously see potential here to even make the effort.

Only a couple of hundred apps will be sneered at by some, but compare that to the rate at which new webOS apps were added and there is room for optimism. Android and the iPhone will always be the king of apps, but I come back to my old argument; how many apps do I need on my phone? It seems as though Bada ‘may’ soon cover most of the bases from gaming to productivity and everything in between, time will tell.

Browser

I can’t say that I am impressed by the Dolphin browser onboard. It is quite quick and uses multi-touch well, but there is no automation in terms of how web pages fit the screen. Double taps can make the text far too small and at other times the text scrolls past each side of the screen. It needs some work.

Extras

There are many extras that I could detail, but my hands are tired now and I have drunk too much coffee so I will keep this bit short. IM is a basic app that deals with instant messaging (obviously), Daily Briefing combines weather, news, feeds and a schedule in the one app and FM Radio works surprisingly well using the included headphones and is one of the better radio solutions I have come across.  It also works in the background when you are doing other things and includes a neat bookmarking feature. The voice recorder is simple to use and recordings can be sent via email or Bluetooth and finally the My Accounts app offers a simple list of all the accounts that are set up on the Wave.

Quirks

Despite the overall ease of use, there are some quirks to the way Bada works. Some actions are far from obvious when you first use them and you will have to spend some time understanding where everything resides. However, there is a consistency to the menus in each app which largely overcomes the initial learning curve. The settings menu verges on the Android style of offering too many tweaks, but some will love this and I do feel that a hardware back button would be a useful addition.

I will conclude this review tomorrow and also look at where Bada could fit in, but one aspect of the Wave has surprised me more than any other. In a matter of days it has fitted into my life with little fanfare and just seems to do the jobs I need it to. From photos to gaming to PIM, I am gradually getting used to something so new, yet so familiar. Has Samsung bridged the gap between all of the other mobile operating systems and created the perfect middle ground? Maybe…

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