Samsung S8530 Wave II review: Riding the wave

A nice 5 megapixel sharpshooter with HD video recording

Just like its predecessor, the Samsung S8530 Wave II is capable of taking 5 megapixel photos and capturing 720p videos.

The S8530 camera viewfinder is quite reminiscent of company's recent cameraphones. The comfortable interface is nicely touch-optimized and has all you need on the two vertical bars on each side of the viewfinder.

The camera interface

All the bases are covered - ISO, white balance, default storage, stabilizer, face and blink detection, geo-tagging etc. You can switch the default storage between the main memory and the microSD card.

If you want to use the touch focus feature, you need to touch-and-hold on the area you wish to focus on and then use the camera key to take a picture.

The Wave II produces nice photos for a 5-megapixel cameraphone. The amount of resolved detail is good enough, noise levels are kept under reasonable control. Only the contrast seems a bit low. Here go the Samsung S8530 Wave II samples.

Camera samples

Photo quality comparison

This is one of the first reviews in which we'll offer you the benefit of our latest Photo Compare Tool. You can see how the Samsung Wave II image quality compares to that of some of the other handsets we have reviewed. Clicking any of the following three images will take you to our dedicated page for some pixel-peeping pleasure.

Samsung S8530 Wave II compared to Samsung S85o0 Wave and Nokia N8

Video recording

The Samsung S8530 Wave II captures 720p@30fps videos. The resolved detail is excellent, contrast is good and the noise levels and compression are amazingly low. The price of the lower compression affects the file size – 20 seconds of video take 30 MB.

The video quality of the Samsung Wave II is among the best there is in the cameraphne segement and it's no worse than that of the original Wave.

The camcorder interface

And here’s a 720p@30fps video sample from the Samsung Wave II.

Video quality comparison

The Samsung S8530 Wave II was also included in our Video Compare Tool database. Check it out – the tool’s page includes a quick walkthrough on how to use it and what to look for.

Samsung S8530 Wave II in the Video Compare Tool

Here’s a 720p video sample from our new test setup. Pay attention to the second half of the video where we lower the light to show you how the the camcorder performs in more challenging conditions.

Top-notch connectivity

Smartphones are usually well-heeled in terms of connectivity and the Samsung Wave II is no exception. All kinds of network connectivity are at the user disposal - GPRS, EDGE and 3G with HSPA. The GSM/EDGE networking of course comes in quad-band flavor and the 3G in dual-band - 900/2100MHz.

Like the S8500 Wave, the S8530 Wave II supports the still fresh Bluetooth version 3.0. Naturally, A2DP is also supported. To activate Bluetooth (and Wi-Fi), you can use the dedicated control hidden in the notification area on top of the screen.

Some apps like the Samsung Store, Facebook or Twitter require a configured packet data profile and an active SIM card to use Wi-Fi connectivity. Still those services don’t actually use packet data instead of Wi-Fi, they just check if it’s available. Strange indeed.

Speaking of Wi-Fi connectivity, the Wave II is also among the few phones to support the latest Wi-Fi 802.11 n connectivity standard.

Wi-Fi with WPS is also at hand. WPS stands for Wi-Fi Protected Setup and it's a hassle-free way to pair a wireless device with your secured network. As long as your wireless router supports the feature, pressing the dedicated button on it allows it to pair with the Samsung Wave II.

Thanks to the Mobile AP you can also turn your Samsung S8530 Wave II into a wireless hotspot for connecting up to three Wi-Fi clients that will use its HSDPA connection for Internet access.

The Mobile AP

The S8530 also packs a standard microUSB port. You can choose from 5 connection modes - Media player, Modem, Mass storage, Samsung Kies and USB debugging. Samsung Kies is the new software used to connect your Samsung mobile phone to a computer. In Mass Storage mode the phone mounts its internal memory (390MB) and the inserted memory card as removable drives on the computer.

A nice Flash-capable web browser

Samsung S8530 Wave II packs the same Webkit-based Samsung Dolphin Browser 2.0 found on the S8500 Wave. You can have multiple pages opened at the same time and there is Flash video support on board.

The web browser interface is reminiscent of the elderly Samsung S8000 Jet. There's multi-touch support, so you can make use of the pinch-zooming feature. That's only one of the three available zooming options, though.

You can also double tap a block of text or an image and the handset will automatically zoom in on it. Another double tap and you are back to the previous zoom level. And last but not least, there comes the one-finger zooming which works flawlessly as well.

The web browser also offers kinetic scrolling and fullscreen view mode. The text search option is also there.

Unfortunately, there is no text reflow (dynamic refitting of text to match the width of the display port). Its job is to make sure the text won't run too wide, so that each line of text will fit horizontally on the screen (hence no need for horizontal scrolling).

The Samsung Wave web browser also sports auto-complete when typing the address of already visited websites.

Browsing GSMArena.com on the S8530 Wave II

As we mentioned the browser has Flash support and the YouTube videos run even within the webpage itself. Of course, you could always watch YouTube videos using the pre-installed YouTube app instead.

Flash video runs directly into the browser • the translate feature

Another cool feature of the web browser is the Quick Translate option. Tap and hold to select some text and then click on the translate button. You will be redirected into a new tab with opened Google Translate and loaded with your result. Nice one.