In today’s highly-contested smartphone market, one could be forgiven in thinking that the battle lays solely between Google’s Android and Apple’s iPhone. However, Samsung has been quickly making a name for themselves with their recently released Samsung Wave S8500 smart phone, which arrived in Ireland on 1 June and has already recorded one million worldwide sales.
As the first Samsung smartphone to utilise the company’s Bada OS, Wave has plenty of stand-out features, such as becoming the first phone to have a Super AMOLED 3.3†display and support for Bluetooth 3.0. With a 5 megapixel camera, 720pvideo recording, and a reasonable price point, it’s no wonder Samsung’s latest is making waves in the smart phone waters – and we at JOE desperately want one.
The aforementioned Super AMOLED display may sound like a mouthful, but essentially means the Wave’s screen features a high resolution WVGA (800×480 pixels) screen and mDNIe (mobile Diital Natural Image engine) technology – the same tech powerful display tech utilised in Samsung’s LCD and LED TV line-ups.
Another plus for the Wave is the TouchWiz 3.0 user interface, which ensures fully customisable menus and home-page – with a ‘Quick Panel’ panel to allow users to group and prioritise applications into one screen.
The big question mark over Wave’s launch, however, was always going to be the device’s Bada OS, which features Samsung Apps, an integrated application store that was launched on the day of the phone’s release. Samsung Apps are to be expanded to more than 50 countries around the world this year and are to be fully functional with all future Bada OS Samsung smart phones.
With the iPhone 4G already on the ropes due to reception issues (and at the time of writing this, still no release date for its Irish launch), Samsung Wave’s early success is a clear sign that Irish consumer’s are pretty taken with their new device, and time will tell if Samsung can now build on their new-found momentum or and consumer base. Either way, we at JOE are already convinced, and heartened, to see that Wave has plenty of selling points to hold its own.
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