TheSmiling-Blog

• Google Mail
• K-9 Mail (2 Accounts - push mail)
• Exchange for Android (calendar, tasks, emails, contacts - refreshing every hour)
• Seesmic as Twitter client (refresh every 30min)
• Facebook App
• Google Talk (recently started using it instead of sending SMS which is a good deal when you have a data-flatrate)
• Google latitude (yep, started stalking a little bit)
• Google Navigation
• Wordpress (mainly managing comments on my posts)
• Telephone (that one was unexpected, wasn't it )

Battery still lasts a regular day, as expected with smartphones. Consider taking a charger with you when you start using Google Navigation a lot, this is really consuming. I don't want to talk about the hardware specs here because you can find them on the web so let's just move on with the other stuff.

I read and heard a lot what people say about the hardware. Some say it looks cheap and feels like plastic, others say it looks classy and love it that it is so light weight. The latter one fits for me too. It just looks and feels awesome and the screen with the super AMOLED 4'' display is just amazing.

The most sentence I hear is: "It looks like an iPhone, that's stupid" ... well, I'm not an apple hater nor a fanboy so I don't really care. But you know, compared to other things like MS Windows, no one ever complained about Linux also going the way of using "windows" for their UI, so yes, there's always someone who does it first ... get over it!

Back to the main topic:

The phone is really fast and has a lot of memory which means that you can probably have every app you use in memory and the android system does not have to close any apps. At this point we get to an issue that can really annoy you: The phone sometimes lags, especially when you start a new app. I heard some rumors about that the internal storage is too slow so every time you start a new app it takes a while to load it. I tried to reproduce this idea by using a task killer that closes unused apps after a while and it looks like this is really the case: I had more problems with lagging when I was using the task killer. I believe this phone has enough memory that you don't need a task killer at all.

What I really like is that this phone has an integrated radio which you can use when you put the headphones in (those are used as the antenna). Also a nice feature that is not implemented in android 2.1 but I heard (haven't checked that yet) that it would be in 2.2 is tethering. The phone supports tethering of 3 other devices via WiFi as well as for one device if connected to USB ... for business cases a great feature that I really appreciate.

Sometimes you find things that are tiny little features but you are still totally impressed that someone thought about it: my girlfriend was calling me on her birthday and on the display it showed a small cake icon. Great if you consider having over 400 contacts in your phone book ... not that I remember all of them but imagine how impressed they will be if you have their birthday "in mind".

Samsungs version of android also has the "missed calls and missed messages"-puzzle view that the new Wave device has when you missed those and turn on the screen. You have to get used to the "pantheon"-launcher that has the menu-button on the bottom right screen when you want to get to the apps-list. I actually installed LauncherPro a few days ago and I have the feeling that this launcher has more performance than the default one ... you better check this for yourself.

The Galaxy S has no hardware keyboard which I don't miss because I never owned an android device that had one. The swype-Keyboard that is shipped with this device by default is really working great and learns your words after the first time you typed them in.

In my eyes, this is the best android device on the market right now, although the lagging when starting apps can be annoying. I still hope on any firmware update or maybe Froyo to fix this problem, but if this is really a hardware issue we have to wait for the next device. My advice as already said: Don't use a task killer, you don't need it with 512 MB RAM, believe me.

If you have any more ideas, corrections or just anything to say about the device or this post, please leave me a comment.

• on an incoming phone call, just lay the device on the display and the ringtone will be muted. It does not send your caller to the mailbox, just mutes the tone
• to sync your Google Account with the phone, don't use "Google" as Account-Type, use "Exchange" and do the following:
  • Enter username and password (the user name here must be the full email address like "yourname@googlemail.com"
  • domain can be left blank
  • put "m.google.com" as URL and I recommend using SSL
  • You can select the data that should be synced (contacts, calendar, emails etc.) but unfortunately you can only sync your main Google calendar

I also just downloaded Samsung Kies (v1.5.0) to test it with my Wave. Make sure you have the set the USB-Connection to "Samsung Kies" on the device. To do so, press the center button to get into your apps, select "setting" and go to "connections". At the very bottom of the list it says USB where you can select several types to use with the phone. Select "Samsung Kies" here. Open Kies and connect your device, it should be recognized immediately ... it took around 5 seconds. (I assume you have installed all necessary device drivers on your computer before)

• download all videos from phone to PC
• open video-editor
• select video that was stored on PC

What I really like because I haven't seen it before is the Samsung App Store in Kies.You can download apps from the Store via Kies and install them from there to your device. That is really a very nice feature. Currently I only found less then 200 apps in the store but I predict that there will be a lot more coming soon. (I won't get my MetricCalc-App ready before my vacation, but I think it should be in the market in 5 to 6 weeks)

Another thing is the phone book and calendar sync. You can store (or backup) all your data to you computer and also sync with Outlook via Kies. That is nice, but: I have synced my Google Contacts via the previously explained method using the Exchange-Account-Connector and my phone book really has a bunch of contacts now ... Kies doesn't see them. Kies only knows about contacts directly stored on the phone .. why is that? It would have been more then awesome to have full access, unfortunately that is not the case.

There are also some additional applications in Kies like a music player and photo-editor so it kind of looks like a very light version of a mac with some applications. I have no opinion whether this is good or bad. With Kies you can also use your device as internet connection which I think is a great feature too. We all know that the Wave already comes with an integrated AccessPoint which can be used for tethering with WiFi, but hey, there are still laptops out there that don't have a WiFi connection, so USB does the job.

I hope this post answers some questions I had in comments lately.

Last Thursday the Samsung Technology UserGroup Frankfurt (STUGFRA) had the first meet and greet with people who are interested in bada in this area.

All together we count 11 people having nice talks at the Australian Bar YOURS in Frankfurt, a nice location with the opportunity to order drinks and food to make a good night even better.

Although we had to skip the "Getting started with C++"-presentation we still had good topics about Samsung bada, a small overview about what bada is and what you can do with it from a developer point of view. As we also mentioned before this wasn't a "developers-only" meeting and I'm glad that we also had some non developer people there to get other points of view like from a marketing perspective and also from a regular user perspective.

Concerning the Wave device everyone was really impressed about the super AMOLED display and also about the performance of the device. All attending GSDAs also had only good news concerning the battery lifetime which seems to last for about a week in standby mode. Still, we have to say that we have the impression that the currently flashed OS on our devices seems not to run any periodically background services which usually eats up some battery.

We also want to come up with a special thanks to the BadaDev-Team which joined our event and also announced it on there not rarely visited website.

We all had a great time and a lot of people already asked for the next event before they left. The next STUGFRA event has not yet been scheduled but we're looking forward to new and inspiring talks around the wave device and the bada system. Please keep an eye on this XING-Group here for more events.

Your STUGFRA-Team

(Michaela, Marc and Norbert)

PS: We have some video material that has not yet been reviewed or prepared. Please be patient about it.

Till now I flashed my Samsung Wave two times which is actually working pretty good.

You should start the Platformdownloader before you connect your phone via USB to your computer. The downloader recognizes the phone after a few seconds and tells you which ports are ready. You must have installed the USB-Drivers on your PC before. You don't have to disable the MTP-Screen, but you can. The MTP-Screen "locks" the screen and displays that your phone is connected, in this case you cannot work with your phone while it is connected to the computer. To disable the MTP-Sceen, you have to dial *#6870# on your phone.

When you're connected with the downloader, your phone should display a mobile phone icon and an arrow pointing on the icon from the top. Now you're ready to go. Click the "Download" Button and pray ... sometimes the Downloader displays a security warning and you can't go on. If so, you have to reconnect your phone. Sometimes this takes more then one try. If you don't get the warning, the downloader starts with flashing your phone. This takes around 3-5 Minutes. The phone will reboot automatically and you're done.

To see the new version number, simply type *#1234# on you phone.

I'm currently running version S8500XXJE4, the CSC-Version is S8500OXAJE4.

The game 'asphalt5' is preinstalled with this version as it was 2 versions before. I now get a little bit more far when trying to connect to my Exchange Server, but I can't sync. I always get a "Connection error" message which is unfortunately not telling me the exact problem. Could be wrong password, could be wrong server URL, I don't know. I double checked all options and couldn't find any typos or wrong settings. Does anybody know if this is just not implemented yet?

Also, I'm still not able to connect to my full Google account. Only Google mail is working, but the full account with contact and calendar sync is not available. Twitter and Facebook work as expected.

As I had some more time yesterday to play around with the Wave I started downloading some HQTEST-Apps from the market. Some are really funny like the "Word World e-book" telling a story about a bug that can't sleep and a frog helping the bug finding a good place to sleep. Looks like some developers are a little bit bored . However, with a 3G connection, the phone is really fun. Twitter, Facebook, App-Download, it's really working great. I also like the downloading animation on the phone, showing the app icon with less brightness and then "filling" the icon with "water" until it has it's full contrast.

I also have to mention the speakers of the phone. The quality of the speakers is really great. I use it all the time when I drive in my car. The sound/voice is clear and loud enough and nothing seems to vibrate or jam the sound.

Now, the feature I like most Video phone call: The current version now does fully work. The versions before had the problem, that the called person had no chance to do anything on the phone when he/she received the phone call except for hanging up. Now, if I'm the one who receives the call, I can enable my video camera and the display is working while I'm on the phone .. great, I really love this feature.

To sum it up: A lot of essential things like synchronizing multiple accounts with mail, contacts and calendar are still not working. The video call bug was fixed, and the phone is still fun.