Samsung unleashes a big Wave

MANILA, Philippines - Samsung Electronics Philippines Corp. (SEPCO) unveiled in a press conference at the Peninsula Manila last Thursday the new Samsung Wave S8500 smartphone.

The Wave is the first mobile handset to be released on Samsung’s new, open mobile platform, Samsung Bada (“bada” being the Korean word for “ocean”).

The smooth and streamlined Wave, which is scheduled to hit the market in June, offers a brilliant and very lifelike Super AMOLED 3.3-inch touch-screen display, a Social Hub to bring users closer to their contacts and connections, and Samsung Apps to empower them in using the phone.

The 3G/quadband Wave’s 1GHz CPU promises a swift, smooth navigation and multi-tasking experience. The high-speed processor makes the touch-screen user interface incredibly responsive and intuitive and, more importantly, means that the 3D and memory-intensive graphic and video performance is unsurpassed.

“The Samsung Wave truly demonstrates our commitment to deliver rich, connected and innovative smartphone experiences to everyone,” said Glenn Glinoga, head of SPECO’s mobile communications business.

“Samsung Wave sees our platform vision become a reality. For the first time, developers have the freedom to create applications across multiple platforms, for consumption on a huge range of devices,” Glinoga said.

“In the Wave, our developer partners can see the ocean of opportunity that is offered by the Bada mobile platform and our device technology,” he added.

The Super AMOLED screen offers a much brighter, clearer, and less reflective AMOLED OnCell display. It boasts a high-resolution WVGA (800 x 480 pixels) screen with Samsung’s mDNIe (mobile Digital Natural Image engine) technology, durable tempered glass surface, and even employs anti-smudge technology.

DNIe technology is a proven display technology incorporated in Samsung’s LCD TV and LED TV line-ups. With a free viewing angle and super-fast response, the Samsung Wave display provides superb image quality for viewing both videos and photos.

Social Hub, on the other hand, has been designed from the ground up to seamlessly integrate all major portals’ e-mail, IM and SNS services directly into the Samsung Wave.

With its TouchWiz 3.0 UI, Social Hub provides users easy-flow integrated experience of messaging, managing contacts and viewing calendar events. TouchWiz 3.0 gives a tactile and intuitive user experience, and includes iconic new features such as motion UI, smart unlock and customizable widget screen.

Social Hub is powered by highly efficient push technology to deliver e-mail messages, calendar events and SNS updates in real-time. The Wave uses a Dolfin 2.0 browser.

Samsung’s Bada platform, meanwhile, allows mobile users to simply and easily download an abundance of applications from Samsung Apps, an integrated application store accessible from the device and online.

Featuring a wealth of games, navigation, social networking, e-book, health and lifestyle applications, Samsung Apps gives users instant access to a huge choice of mobile experiences.

Samsung established its mobile application ecosystem through the launch of Samsung Mobile Innovator in 2008 and the Samsung Application Seller Site, which were then followed by Samsung Application Store as another key element of this offering.

Already launched in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Singapore, Germany, Brazil and China, this will be expanded to more than 50 countries this year.

The new Samsung Wave sports a five-megapixel auto-focus camera with various shooting modes (including vintage, lomo, etc.) plus face and blink detection. Onboard data storage is 2GB/8GB expandable to 32GB via microSD card.

The Wave offers fully customizable menus and homepage. For those who demand access to their social networking sites at all times, the device allows users to change the layout of the homepage to allow instant access to Twitter, Facebook and a host of other social networking sites.

The device’s homepage can also be turned into an intuitive media player or customized to feature favorite images. Users will also benefit from Quick Panel, a way of prioritizing and aggregating applications into one screen for instant access.

Multi-codec support for DivX and Xvid and support for 5.1 surround-sound delivery transform the device into a personal entertainment system while HD video decoding and recording capabilities make the Wave a superb device for capturing, sharing and viewing videos.

Last but not least — and for the first time in the world — the Samsung Wave incorporates Bluetooth 3.0 as well as the newest Wi-Fi 802.11n standard.