Samsung Wave 3

We first got a view of Bada 2.0 on the Samsung Wave Y Young that definitely was one of the best phones in that price tag. Now, Samsung’s Wave 3 ups the game with the addition of a Super AMOLED screen and some more goodies. But, it’s also upped the price tag and now competes with quite a few powerful Androids. Let’s find out if it’s worth the bucks.

Design and Build Quality

Samsung and plastic have been synonyms, since quite a while now. However, if you go to see, the same kind of treatment is not meted out to their Bada counterparts. A good thing? Definitely yes! Who would want to hold a plastic bar in their hands anyway? The Wave 3 is all about curves, smooth metal finishes, scratch resistance and fingerprint proof unibody design. It blows the Android phones out of the competition. 

Let’s take a quick tour around the device. Towards the front, you have the four inched SUPERA AMOLED display with a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels. Above that we have the proximity sensor, the front camera and the ambient light sensor, while the capacitive call and end buttons and the physical home button is located below. At the back, we have a 5 mp shooter, the LED flash and the speaker grill. Moving onto the sides, there’s a volume rocker on the left, while the power button is located on the right. Nothing out of the ordinary here, except that the phone doesn’t have a camera shutter button and the microSD card slot is located under the battery cover and is not hot swappable. 

 The metal finish also means you are nowhere compromising with the quality of this device. It’s sturdy and has a firm grip when held in one's hand. No plastic parts, no bendy flaps; just pure, strong metal. The Wave 3 weighs a cool 127 grams and with that slim profile, its quite a looker. 

With the Wave 3 its about three things - class, sophistication and sexy. Definitely an A in this department. 

 

Features And Performance Interface

The Wave 3 is powered by a 1.4 GHz Scorpion processor and has 512 MB of RAM with Bada 2.0 running atop. With the Wave Y Young, we had zero issues with the interface speed. Upping the processor speed only makes it smoother, if it already wasn’t. Flipping through the menus and overall navigation is smooth and seamless. The UI is fluid, but as mentioned, it does have those few hiccups that need to be fixed. For example, the notification bar auto clearing problem still exists. 

The interface

About the looks of the interface - if you’ve used Samsung TouchWiz UI, you’ll be no stranger to their Bada interface. It’s extremely similar and you can’t really tell one from the other, unless you go into minute details. One drawback that this one has is limited pre-installed widgets. The app store can help you out with that, but again, there’s extremely limited content out there, something we will delve upon in detail in the misc apps section.  

Bada 2.0 also now supports integrated multi tasking, speech recognition and push notifications.