This is my first and small review about the wave (S8500) bada phone from Samsung including statements from other people I gave the phone to.
The first thing to mention is always the screen. Bright and detailled super AMOLED Display, everyone is just amazed and hold his/her phone beside to check the difference.
Every developer I gave the phone to thought it would have an android operating system but was wondering why this OS works so fluent. I explained that this is bada and works with C++ which left no open questions concerning the fluent screen flow on the phone. This also affects the accelerator.
Next people say that they like the size of the phone and that it looks and feels like hight quality material was used. I do agree with that.
The 3 button system is not so intuitive but easy to learn, that’s just a small issue which should be gone in minutes after owning this phone.
I haven’t tested the camera that much but I did some video phone calls and those are working pretty good. You can switch between the front and the back camera while having the phone call which makes it easy to show the other party around where you are. This is very fun and will probably use this feature more often as soon as the bug on the receivers side is fixed)
The battery lifetime seems to be pretty good but I don’t have much data traffic at the moment so I guess I have to test this a little bit more.
When people click through the phone they usually end up at the game asphalt5. The first thing they say is something like “wow”. The 3D graphics are just great and the game works fluent as expected on a C++ machine.
One big issue is the empty market. As we found out with the mobilers project, apps are the heart of each smartphone to personalize it. Without a good stack of apps, it’s just half the fun. The Twitter and Facebook clients for example are so basic that I could easily use the website of those tools instead. (I know we’re in beta status right now, but I want to mention it as a big point that has to be “fixed” when the first phone will be released)
From a developer point of view the IDE is good to work with and the debugging on the simulator and the target device works really good. It still has some small issues here and there but from what I’ve been trying so far the biggest obstacle is the programming language that I have to get used to as I’m a developer from the Java world. (I’ll fix that problem in the near future )
I see I’m drifting off the the main topic here so I might write another post about the developer point of view later.
To sum it up: I believe that the wave will find a lot of enthusiasts and as I’m already convinced by this phone I already try to “sell” it to potential customers.
