Samsung S8530 Wave II review: Riding the wave

Phonebook is great

The Wave II phonebook has rich functionality and practically unlimited capacity.

The handset displays the phone memory and SIM-stored contacts in the phonebook. There is a dedicated setting for that, so you really can have all of your contacts gathered in one place.

You can search the entries by either flick-scrolling the list or using the alphabet scroll at the side of the screen. Gradual typing search is also available.

The Wave phonebook

There are many info fields that you can assign to each contact, but it still remains perfectly organized. You have all the types listed (numbers, email addresses, etc) and there's a plus sign on the right - clicking it adds another item of that type. Pressing the minus sign under it deletes the unneeded field.

Checking out and editing a contact’s details

Bada OS have another cool feature in the phonebook, which is also available in the Android OS on Galaxy S. In the main contact list, a swipe to the right on a name will dial the contact’s default number, while a swipe to the left will start the New message interface. The side-sweep thing works in other lists too where you have names or numbers.

Telephony

The Samsung S8530 Wave II caused us no trouble during calls. There were no reception issues or in-call voice quality drops.

There is some kind of smart dialing on board but it’s not exactly useful. Once you tap in some digits the Wave II shows the contacts in your phonebook whose number contains them. Now, we don’t know if you have the habit of remembering the numbers of your contacts but we certainly don’t.

Smart dialing could have been better

Thanks to the proximity sensor, your screen will automatically turn off during a call. The available options during a call include muting, using the keypad, holding the call or adding another call to this conversation.

The in-call screen

The call log can be activated with the call receiver key. It shows all the dialed, received, missed calls or messages in one list, but there are also different tabs for easy sorting the history.

We also ran our traditional loudspeaker test on the S8530 Wave II. It snatched a Below average score. More info on our loudspeaker test as well as other results can be found here.

Speakerphone test	Voice, dB	Pink noise/ Music, dB	Ringing phone, dB	Overal score
Apple iPhone 4	65.9	66.5	67.3	Below Average
Samsung S8530 Wave II	66.3	65.9	66.6	Below Average
Sony Ericsson XPERIA X8	66.6	66.6	69.1	Average
LG E900 Optimus 7	66.6	66.7	75.7	Very good
Samsung S8500 Wave	69.8	66.6	75.5	Good
HTC Desire Z	72.7	72.7	82.5	Very Good
HTC Desire	76.6	75.7	84.6	Excellent

Messaging

There are two major sections in the main menu - Messages and Email. The Samsung S8530 Wave II supports sending and receiving SMS, MMS, and email messages. SMS and MMS share the same editor.

SMS and MMS share the same editor

It offers folder (tabbed) view and conversation. The first one shows all your folders as tab at the bottom, while the conversation groups you messages by sender.

Swiping on a message header will do exactly the same as in the phonebook – a left swipe starts a new message, while swiping to the right will start a call.

When it comes to email, setting yours on the second-gen Wave is hassle-free. For a Gmail account for example, all we had to do was fill in the account and password fields - the connection settings were retrieved automatically.

In case you have to setup your email account manually, there is a host of settings that you can tweak. Both POP3 and IMAP4 protocols are supported and you can set the handset to auto retrieve new mail at a preset interval with a dedicated setting for roaming. The email client supports SSL encryption too.

The email app

The email client looks exactly the same as the messaging one – it uses the folder (tabbed) view. Multiple accounts are also supported. You can switch among them any time and this time there is also a shared inbox for all your emails.

Maximum attachment size for both outgoing and incoming mail is 10 MB.

All sorts of text-input options are on board

Capacitive touchscreens usually won't give you handwriting recognition but the S8530 Wave II is among the few exceptions. And while the original Wave came with a smallish display, the new Wave sports a large enough screen. And handwriting on it is a real pleasure.

If you prefer typing to drawing, go for the on-screen keyboards. You get diverse options - a portrait numpad and a landscape full-QWERTY keyboard with or without the T9 Trace enabled. The Nuance T9 Trace text-input method is similar to the highly popular Swype software.

You tap on the screen and move from letter to letter without lifting the finger in the air until you’ve gone through all letters building the word you’re writing. Just like Swype, T9 Trace recognizes the word you’re trying to write (even if you weren’t that accurate while selecting the letters) and puts it in the text above the keyboard.

That should allow you to write up to 40 words per minute. Now, that’s fast typing! Plus, if you prefer the old way of typing letter-by-letter it’s still functional.

The Wave II features multiple text-input options