Samsung S8500 Wave review: Hello, world!

Games

There are three full games pre-installed on the Wave – Asphalt 5, EDGE and Parachute Panic.

The Asphalt 5 is the next installment of the popular series and uses the accelerometer for control.

Asphalt 5

The EDGE is a very simple game, which also uses the accelerometer to control a cube over a space platform. Your goal is one - to make it to the end of the level.

Parachute Panic is very cute game – some guys jump from planes and you must open their parachutes and help them land on the ships below. The game has very nice paper-like styling and is quite fun.

EDGE • Parachute Panic

There is also a bunch of demo games. They give you only about two minutes of gameplay each.

Unfortunately, Bada OS is still very young and its gaming potential is yet to be revealed in the future.

The Samsung Apps store is promising

The Bada OS offers a native application repository from its start – the Samsung Apps. Samsung has promised over a 100 apps to be in their store on the Wave’s launch. Currently there are only 60 apps and they are all free.

It seems the payment system is not yet implemented and that may as well be the reason for the small number of apps available.

Samsung Apps is very similar to the Android Market. It has three tabs – featured, top and category view. There is also a download section and search option.

Samsung Apps

The whole idea of an app store running from day one is great and with the SDK already available to the developers we believe the Samsung Apps will continue to grow in time.

Samsung Dive locates your device, remote wipes it

Competition between phone makers is getting really heated, so they're offering more and more free services to lure in customers. Samsung Dive is a prime example - it's a phone finder/remote wipe service, something which used to be a premium, corporate-centric feature back in the day.

The officially supported devices currently include the Samsung Galaxy S and Galaxy S II, along with the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Tab 8.9 and the Samsung Wave. That's it, even the Galaxy S Plus isn’t listed. An exception we found is that the Samsung Wave II is supported too even though it's not on the list.

The star of the show here is the Remote Controls feature (actually, it's the only feature). It can locate your phone or you can set it to track the phone for 12 hours on, recording its position every 15 minutes. If you’ve only misplaced your phone, say, it’s behind the couch or your dog’s been using it as a bite toy (true story!), there's an option to ring the phone out loud too.

And if it turns out that the phone isn't in the house you have the option to lock the phone, wipe its memory and check the call logs to see if there were any calls made from it.

Locking the phone lets you enter a message to display on the device (up to 100 characters) and you can enter a phone number, which will be the only number callable from the locked phone (you'll also get an SMS to that number if the SIM card is changed). A 4-digit PIN is also required, which can later be used to unlock the phone.

Ringing the phone is your first option • It's good to lock the device if it's not at home

Keep in mind that if you choose to wipe the device, you'll no longer be able to use Samsung Dive on it. You can re-register if you find it, but tracking will no longer work, which means remote wiping is your last resort.

Wiping the device clears all its data and disables Dive • Check the Call log first

When trying to locate your device, you have two options - Find my phone and Track my phone. They may sound alike, but they do differ a bit. Track my phone records the phone's location in 15-minute intervals over a period of over 12 hours and plots the locations on the map (Google Maps is used).

Locating the device on a map

But, for it to work, the phone needs to have a GPS lock - the Cell-ID and Wi-Fi positioning won't cut it. So, if the phone is in a building or in another area with poor GPS signal, tracking won't work.

Find my phone works fine with the less accurate options but it only shows the phone’s current location and it won't record past positions. The nice thing is that even if all location options were set to off before the handset was misplaced, those will be enabled automatically as soon as you start looking for it.

Unlike HTCSense.com, Samsung Dive is purely for locating your device or remote wiping it. There are no options to view/manage contacts or messages or anything like that.