Samsung S8500 Wave preview: First look

Gallery is smooth and sweet

The gallery or Media Browser, as Samsung call it, is basic - all images and clips are displayed all at once as small thumbs. When you select a file you can see it in either portrait or landscape mode.

The gallery supports pinch-zooming alright.

The Media browser

Multimedia on the go

Multimedia is certainly a S8500 Wave forte. The brilliant display is great for watching videos. The interface of the video player follows the logic of whole UI. Settings and options are a tap away, otherwise hidden when not needed.

The Samsung S8500 Wave supports DivX/XviD files out of the box. Subtitles are welcome as well. Interestingly, you can search for a specific scene using the "Mosaic search" feature. It breaks the clip down to 16 or 36 parts and displays the first frame of each to help you find the scene you're looking for.

An awesome video player

The music player has been redone as well. Tracks are sorted by albums, artists, genres, composers, etc. You can hide some of those sorting options if you don't use them. At the end only those that you've marked will be displayed on top of the screen (as tabs) while the ones you have unmarked will be gone.

The major improvements however are only visible when you use the music player in landscape mode. Comparison to iPhone's Cover flow is inevitable with some important differences. Browsing albums or tracks is pretty standard in portrait mode: you get a list of all songs or albums, each with a small thumb. The list is smoothly scrollable with impressive kinetic effect.

If you're browsing in landscape mode you'll be getting an album art arch of virtual CDs. Tapping on a CD will expand it to show all the tracks within the given album.

Alternatively, sweeping down across the screen (from the arrow above the central CD) will display a virtual dial to let you search the albums or tracks alphabetically.

Eye-catching music player

There are multiple equalizer presets (called "Sound effects" here) including Wow HD, Mega bass, Bass enhancement, etc.