Samsung Wave (S8500)
For this edition of 'The forgotten smartphone', we go back to the year 2010. That year saw the release of the Samsung Wave (GT-S8500), which was supposed to attack other smartphones. That year, Samsung bet fully on its own OS Bada, which means 'Ocean' in Korean. The manufacturer itself described the device as 'The Smarterphone', meaning even better than a smartphone. Samsung bet full on the Wave with lots of promotion and advertising; according to sources, one of the company's biggest and most expensive campaigns ever. What did the device have to offer at the time?
First to the smartphone; the device featured a 3.3-inch Super AMOLED display, a 1 GHz processor, HSDPA and WiFi support and a thickness of 10.9 inches. In doing so, the screen stood out because it had a special lag that was supposed to stop dirt. It featured a 5 megapixel camera (with LED flash) that even allowed you to film in HD resolution!
The Samsung Wave further featured an application for YouTube, an FM radio, 3.5 millimetre headphone jack and a Micro-USB port. The Wave was equipped with an internal storage of just under 400MB. You could expand this with a memory card of up to 32GB. The battery had a capacity of 1500 mAh.
Bada
Bada OS was thus Samsung's own operating system. Developers could make their applications suitable for the devices and then place them in the dedicated application store. However, the offering was less than that of competitors like Android and Apple's App Store. Back in the days when Hyves was still popular, this application was installed on the device by default.
In terms of app offerings, there were also several apps of Dutch origin, including Buienradar. For internet browsing, the Dolfin browser could be found. In Bada, similarities could be found with Samsung's TouchWiz interface. So we saw the different icons, layout and widgets back. Thanks to Social Hub, you had updates from social networks and messages from your mail at your fingertips.
The Samsung Wave came on the market for around €350. In its first month on sale, the manufacturer is said to have sold more than a million units of the Wave.
Samsung Wave summarised in 5 points:
- Bada as the operating system
- Super AMOLED display
- HD filming
- Anti-smudge display against fingerprints and dirt
- High expectations
