Samsung Wave early review: Bada bling

The Samsung Wave has crashed on the shore of the mobile phone market... oh we can't keep this up. We promise no more tide-based puns, just photos of our first look at the Wave

Richard Trenholm

Richard Trenholm was CNET's film and TV editor, covering the big screen, small screen and streaming. A member of the Film Critic's Circle, he's covered technology and culture from London's tech scene to Europe's refugee camps to the Sundance film festival.

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Richard Trenholm

Feb. 15, 2010 6:42 a.m. PT

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Update: Our full Samsung Wave review is now live on the site. The original article is below.

We've had our first hands-on experience with the new Samsung Wave feature phone, but we're going to spare you the watery puns. Mainly because we've run out.

The Wave is the first phone to use Samsung's Bada operating system. It feels like a fully fledged OS at first fingering, thanks to the TouchWiz 3.0 interface. This sees you gliding seamlessly among features such as integrated contacts and messages, widgets and the 5-megapixel camera. One of our favourite features is the drag and drop home screen, enabling you to place your favourite features and widgets a mere finger-swipe away.

The Wave boasts a Super AMOLED screen, which is like AMOLED, but super-er. The screen has a resolution of 800x480 pixels, with technology borrowed from Samsung's televisions. It certainly makes pictures and video look gorgeous, with lush, vibrant colour and bright, easy to navigate functions. The accelerometer allows you to scroll through your pictures and other media by tilting the phone from side to side. The capacitive screen supports multitouch, so you can pinch your fingers over a photo to zoom in and out.

You'll be able to pack your Wave with plenty of photos, video and music thanks to the 2GB or 8GB built-in memory, with a microSD card bump available. A 2GB microSD card is included in the box.

Click through our photo gallery to see the Wave, Bada and TouchWiz in action, but not before you've watched our hands-on video.

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Tapping the top of the screen gives you handy shortcuts to different connection options, making it a breeze to fire up the Wi-Fi.

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Tapping the bottom of the screen brings up customisable widgets.

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Contacts are presented in the usual scrolling list form.

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Click a contact and you can see all their messages, emails, texts and social network witterings in one place. Samsung calls this the Social Hub.

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The messaging option offers a Qwerty keyboard...

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...and the accelerometer flips it into landscape for a smidge more space. As with many landscape onscreen keyboards, this does rather squish your view of what you've written.