The new Flagship handset from the Koreans has docked, bringing with it a load of brand spanking new technology and high expectations. The Samsung Wave enters the Smartphone market full of promise, but will it be in it for the long haul? Let’s find out…

At first glance the Samsung Wave looks like your typical full touch handset, there’s a 3.3” display dominating the front, the usual three hardware keys underneath and all your extra add-ons scattered around the rest of the body, volume rocker, camera lens, audio port, USB port and so on. You would be forgiven for thinking that the Wave is just another high end smartphone, the likes of which are currently hogging the spotlight. Because it’s not until you turn the phone on that the standard Smartphone impression is blown out of the water. Once booted into life, the Wave’s rather modest touchscreen turns into the best mobile phone display to date. The driving force behind this achievement is that new technology we mentioned, a Super AMOLED display. You might have heard the term AMOLED before, it’s basically screen technology that provides clear images while running on little power. Wave’s Super variety means that the image is around five times clearer than the normal Smartphone, this touchscreen is unlike anything else on the market and wouldn’t look out of place nestled somewhere in the TV department. The Wave packs some pretty nifty capacitive technology too, making the touchscreen very sensitive. Throw in the 1GHz Processor, new TouchWiz UI and Bada operating system and you’ve got one of the fastest, most responsive screens going.

Being the first in the Bada Fleet puts enormous pressure on the Wave. If the handset flunks, chances are people won’t come back to Samsung’s operating system in a hurry. Fear not loyal Samsung users, because the Korean techbods have done a fantastic job in joining the Bada system and the latest TouchWiz 3.0 interface seamlessly. (For those still unsure about Operating Systems and what they do Click Here for our bitesize OS guide) The Samsung regulars may have already encountered TouchWiz, it’s essentially how the phone looks and works, from menu style and layout to the number of homescreens and widgets. The standout difference between the Wave and the rest of the Samsung portfolio is its graphics. Obviously the screen is going to play some part in this, but even simple things like backgrounds, themes and icons have been vastly improved and look far more sophisticated. There are ten different homescreens on offer, all ready to be filled with widgets, shortcuts and bookmarks. Here lies another key change, instead of taking up space on the left hand margin, the widget tray now sits at the bottom of the screen and can be pulled up at any time to add or remove items from the homescreen.

Another welcome addition is the Android-Esq notification bar at the top, click anywhere near the top of the screen, where the battery and signal bars are and you will get a drop down bar which holds all kinds of useful information, including notifications, phone info and a handy tool for the music player. If you’re listening to music but don’t want the player to take up the entire screen you can run it in the background and operate it from this bar. Most will want to listen to music on their phone while doing something else, meaning more often than not the fantastic CD and album art visuals that are on offer will sadly, get overlooked. Both the Music and Video player follow the same Touchwiz theme, with attractive and easy to use menus. Screen quality makes the Samsung Wave an ideal candidate for film watching and video playback, especially since it supports both DivX and XviD formats as well as packing a nifty subtitle option. We can’t talk about multimedia facilities without mentioning the camera, the Wave’s 5megapixel shooter comes fully equipped with image enhancing options, white balance, face smile and blink detection, geotagging, autofocus and LED flash. There’s 720p video recording on offer too, which is so good, it could easily fill in for a standalone video camera.

No Smartphone would be complete without an extensive connectivity line up, GPRS, EDGE, 3G with HSDPA and HSUPA all feature as does WiFi and brand new Bluetooth 3.0, making the Wave one of the first in the new Bluetooth club. There’s space for an external memory card which can handle up to 32GB and a microUSB port for fast and simple file transfers.

The Samsung Wave has everything you could possible want from a Smartphone and more. It’s stylish, simple, sleek and boasts the best touchscreen around by a mile. Even the die hard iPhone fans will find it hard to resist!