Ocean rules the Wave

Streamlined, seamless and sleek, the new Samsung Wave is a smart multimedia phone with good performance and a large and impressively bright screen that lets you stay connected to your social networks while you're on the go.

Its 3.3-inch super AMOLED screen with 480x800 resolution screen is excellent for watching video clips and reading web pages and feeds from Facebook and Twitter as well as other networking sites.

The colourful screen contrasts well with the dark grey body and black strips at the top and bottom. It's lightweight at 118 grams making it a dream to carry around.

Web pages and images look super clear and the photos taken with its 5 megapixel camera are also satisfyingly sharp.

The good performance can be credited to the fast processor, the Hummingbird S5PC110 CPU, which includes 1GHz ARM Cortex-8 CPU and a powerful built-in PowerVR SGX 3D graphics engine. Games and web graphics did not slow down during the test thanks to the graphics engine and CPU.

Samsung Wave rides on Samsung's own operating system, which is called Bada. Bada is Korean for ocean so the phone's name is a perfect match.

The Wave uses Samsung's own OS and users will find a smaller number of applications available than for Android OS phones. That's not to say you'll be caught short. There're may be fewer than 200 Wave applications available but that's more than enough to answer most needs.

One of them's a web browser called Dolfin, which is easy to use and there are more applications for connecting to Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live, MySpace, weather reports, YouTube, as well as for reading news feeds from AP and for several fun games.

Samsung has promised that thousands more applications from many developers will be approved soon.

I tested Wave on the TOT 3G network and had no problem connecting to my Gmail and Hotmail accounts. The onscreen QWERTY keyboard is not difficult to type on, especially when the phone is in horizontal view. The phone also supports typing in Thai with the layout of traditional Thai keyboard.

Samsung Wave also has Wi-Fi connection. I connected it to my Wi-Fi router at home and could quickly download YouTube clips for watching as well as Samsung applications for using on the phone.

Wave allows you to have 10 home screens, which you can select and customise to suit your needs.

The first home screen is very useful for a social network as it is loaded with the Social Hub widget. You can add your Facebook, MySpace and Twitter accounts and their feeds will be displayed in the Social Hub window.

The seconds screen is also very useful as it is loaded with the Daily briefing widget, which reports weather forecasts from AccuWeather.com, ApMobile's news update and stock updates from Yahoo! Finance.

Wave also comes with an ebook reader and you can download more free ebooks using the Samsung Apps widget.

Wave can also function as a high-quality MP3 player. It comes with a 3.5mm stereo jack for connecting to your choice of premium headphone though the provided stereo headset also reproduced good quality music with powerful bass and clear voice.

Its 5-megapixel camera is good quality for a mobile phone and can record 720p (1280x720) video up to 30 frames per second.

You will have to recharge the phone everyday if you extensively use its multimedia features or text, browse and connect to social networks a lot.

Samsung Wave has a suggested retail price of Bt13,900.

key specs

- Band: GSM&EDGE Band: 850/900/1800/1900; 3G Band: 900/2100 

- Operation System: Samsung Bada OS 

- Browser: Dolfin Browser 2.0 

- Display: 3.3-inch Super AMOLED with 480 x 800 pixel resolution

- Camera resolution: 5MP

- Video resolution: 720p

- Connectivity: Bluetooth V.3.0, USB V.2.0, Wi-Fi

- Memory: User Memory 1GB, expandable with microSD up to 32GB

- Battery: 1500mAh

- Dimension (HxWxD): 118 x 56 x 10.9mm 

- Weight: 118g