Samsung Wave 3 Review

Media

The Wave 3 comes equipped with a super awesome music player – not just looks wise, but in the quality section as well. A brief description of the interface first. The tabs and icons are neatly stacked and you get 5.1 surround channel and a few equalizer presets. The interface looks awesome in the landscape mode as well with the cover art and the jog dial for segregating artists and songs.

A winner in this department

In the audio quality department, all basic formats (Supported audio codecs include MP3, eAAC+, WMA and WAV) are played by this smartphone, but unlike the Android counterparts, you don’t have too many third party players, if you need a particular format to be rendered on your phone. Music playback via headphones is awesome, but we’ll make a point out here – we tried it with our test Koss headphones, as our review unit came without headphones. 720p video looks crisp and clear on the SUPER AMOLED display and as a media consumption device, the Wave 3 is definitely amongst the best out there.

Another experience in landscape mode

Connectivity

This department has been covered pretty well with support for 3G, Wi-Fi, DLNA, Bluetooth, GPS and Wi-Fi Direct. Samsung’s Dolfin browser has been added into the mix as well and though its pretty smooth and all, flash videos would stutter and play and we reckon it’s due to the software here and not the hardware. In terms of calling, the voice quality is loud and clear and our counterpart on the other hand could hear us pretty well, too. The in-call recorder option, however was not present on this phone.

Social networking is handled well with Social Hub as well as dedicated apps. All share has been included for your DLNA needs. Polaris Office is present as well for your document editing and viewing needs. One addition we loved with Bada 2.0 was the integrated voice command that worked pretty well in recognizing our thick accent and working on it. Something like Siri, but without a hefty price tag.

Misc Apps

There’s not much here in terms of both quality and quantity. Besides Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and ChatON, Samsung has also bundled in an app called Caster that lets you share your web content. Orkut has been thrown in for good measure(?) as well. In case there are too many applications running in the background, the in-built task manager comes in handy.

Misc. apps - limited

Now, about the app store. This is what is limiting the Bada platform from competing with the biggies. The app store is so limited that we couldn’t even find basic VOIP apps, like Skype or Viber. Forget that, there was no Whatsapp, either. You get what we’re saying? It may have some great games, like Asphalt 6 and all, but popular utility apps still need to be ported over to Bada. Samsung, listening?