Samsung S8600 Wave 3 preview: Exclusive first look

An Android-ish gallery

Bada 2.0 brings a completely new gallery which resembles the Android one a lot. It's still very easy to use, but is prettier than before.

The different albums and folders appear as piles of photos, which fall in neat grids once selected. If you have online albums over at Picasa those show up as separate stacks as well.

The gallery supports finger scrolling or panning so you can skip images without having to return to the default view. Just swipe to the left or right when viewing a photo in fullscreen mode and the previous/next image will appear.

The pinch zooming is also available here thanks to the Samsung Wave 3 multi-touch support but you can also double tap on the screen to zoom in and out.

The new gallery

The Wave 3 gallery shows the pictures in full resolution unlike most Android handsets, so zooming on a picture will reveal much more detail. Similarly, with the Android galleries, the Wave 3 one offers rotate and crop tools too.

Viewing a single image in the gallery

One of the best video players

Multimedia is certainly a S8600 Wave 3 forte, as it was on the previous Waves. The large Super AMOLED screen is great for watching videos. The interface of the video player is quite simple, yet powerful.

The Wave 3 supports DivX/XviD files out of the box. And what is even more impressive, subtitles are welcome as well.

Video player is awesome • settings

Performance with higher-res videos is great – it played 720p videos like a champ. Not a big surprise considering the Wave 3 records 720p videos itself, but it’s still impressive for a mobile phone. We threw everything we had at it – DivX, XviD, MP4 and even MKV files - all in 720p resolution. The Samsung Wave 3 handled them smoothly and hassle-free.

Music player has gone Android-ish too

Just like the gallery, the Bada 2.0 music player has been redesigned and now looks just like the Android one. The interface is laid out in four tabs for the available sorting options: all artists, all tracks, playlists and albums.

Eye-catching music player • now playing

The user interface looks even better when you use the music player in landscape mode. 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.

The landscape mode looks great

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.

The alphabetical wheel