Sun, beach, food and Wave in Penang

Over the weekend, I’ve been taken away to Penang. What for? I don’t know.

But what I do know is that I’ll be indulging in an abundance of sunshine, a nice stretch of deserted beach along the Gurney Drive, plenty of mouth-watering food and, of course, enjoying the Wave.

But not just any Wave.

Wave hello to the Samsung Wave, the latest Bada-platform smartphone from Samsung.

But before that…

O’Briens at home before I set on my journey.

Scrumptious, filling… It’s heavenly

And then, of course, there was the Wave. While in the car, I whipped out my EOS 40D and took a few shots of the phone as I browse through it.

This is what makes it all special… The 3.3in Super AMOLED display.

Samsung had a poor design choice when it comes to the Wave box packaging. It’s rather snugly enclosed shoebox-style, and would require a few strong vertical nudging to loosen the contents shelf out of the enclosure.

The nested Samsung Wave.

You pull the plastic flap at the bottom of the phone to extract it out of the cavity. Standard affair for most of today’s phone packagings.

This may be the first time I can safely say this: the phone feels solid. Glossy, fingerprint-attracting plastic surfaces are kept to a minimum here (unlike the Omnia 2). The brushed metal textured plastic battery compartment cover does feel relatively well done.

In the past, Samsung has used plastic pull-out covers for most of their cable ports. But this time, it’s a sleeker sliding port cover. +1 point for design. There’s also the standard 3.5mm audio jack and a speaker at the top.

You open the battery compartment cover by pushing this latch away. Requires a little more effort to remove, but the cover clicks back assuringly in place.

At where I’d expect to find a SIM slot is actually a microSD slot beneath the battery. Yes, that means no hot-swapping. -1 point for impracticality.

And then I booted it up. The screen amazed me. Colours are bright and saturated (but not exactly accurate).

Menu text appears very sharp on the 800×480 screen.

Asphalt 5 were among the few games preloaded on this particular unit. I can’t be sure if they’re on retail units as well, but you can always check with your local dealer.

Just like on the iPhone, you can use the phone’s accelerometer to control the game. However, the game’s frame rates weren’t sufficiently high while the viewport automatically rotated and adjusted itself, and the momentary lag did cause a slight disorientation which may possibly affect overall gaming experience. It’s not a big deal, but it does irk me.

Holding down the menu button brings up the task switcher. You can close applications by tapping on the red no-entry icon on each application.

The communications bar resembles Android’s notification bar, except that it only slides to about a third of the screen.

Shown above is Bada’s lock screen. You unlock by dragging (or “sweeping”) a semi-transparent dark box off the screen in any direction.

This is the notes application with the virtual QWERTY keyboard. It has an overwhelming resemblance to Android’s keyboard. Typing isn’t too bad, but the T9 often guesses the wrong word.

Symbols, including the full stop and comma, are tucked away in the Symbols/Numbers menu. I find it relatively tedious that I have to navigate to a new keyboard menu just to insert basic symbols like these.

Holding down the language button will bring up the Keyboard settings pop-up, from which you can toggle predictive text (i.e. T9 input) and change the keyboard layout.

Here’s the predictive text demo. As you can see, it auto-corrects most spelling errors but does not give you an option to ignore the suggested word.

The keyboard in landscape layout is nicely spacious to type on, although I’ve accidentally hit the Cancel button when I meant to click on Enter far too many times.

While the keyboard may be comfortable to type in landscape mode, the phone itself isn’t. The angular edges of the Wave leaves a relatively discomforting pressure on your palm as you hold it upright.

Bada beautifully transitions between portrait/landscape with an iPhone-style rotation. Shown above is a frame of the rotate transition.

The Wave has a 5MP still camera with plenty of options to choose. However, the setting menus is rather obstructive, as shown with the Shooting mode selection menu above that occupies the whole screen.

An interesting feature that I’ve seen for the first time is the “Against the light” scene mode. It basically fills in flash to illuminate dark subjects. However, a few tests show that it does not work as desired because of the different white balance between the flash and the natural ambience light (especially under sunlight).

Above is a sample shot of the phone box in Vintage mode set to Monochrome, which adds vignette effects to the picture edges. Quite fancy for the casual photographer.

The Wave also sports a Panorama mode, which works by taking the first frame and then moving the phone in one direction (like Sony Cybershot’s Sweep Panorama mode).

Above is a test shot in normal mode. The image appears sharp and beautiful, but it could be just the Super AMOLED screen. Who knows?

Above is the same photo, but zoomed in to the maximum. As you can see, there is minimal sharpening artefacts. Lines and textures are sharp, which indicates minimal/intelligent noise reduction (if any, that is).

Video-wise, the Wave boasts 720p video recording. Almost all ARM Cortex A8-based smartphones in the market also have this feature, including the Google Nexus One, HTC Desire and Apple iPhone 4.

When it comes to the phone, Bada has a traditional-looking dial screen. At least now the numbers don’t appear in retro colours.

The Bada menu closely resembles the iPhone’s home screens, with a grid of icons over several pages with a dock at the bottom. You can download and install new applications from the Samsung Apps store. New applications appear on the menu, and the icon “fills up” to indicate download/install progress.

Shown above is the messaging menu. It begins as a standard text message, and automatically converts into a multimedia message when you tap on the “Add media” button.

Samsung said their Super AMOLED is bright enough to use comfortably under the sunlight. They lied. The screen is at maximum brightness, by the way.

After that short in-the-car session, I arrived in Penang. I spotted a white Skyline GT-R in the carpark.

The Skyline GT-R seems to be challenging the Perodua Viva face-to-face.

Then I went to check into the hotel, before going to Queensbay Mall.

Spotted some My FM and TM fun show.

Then at the concourse, there was a Toy Story 3 carnival thing.

A long line of people queuing up to watch the Toy Story 3 trailer in 3D on a Samsung 3D LED TV.

Say hi!

The emcee had a quiz game and gave away prizes to lucky kids.

A guy drifting his RC car around a track.

Look, it’s froggy!

Shoes.

No smoking. If you catch yourself on fire, call the Bomba.

Cute little squids.

The famous Penang honeyed BBQ chicken wings.

The not-so-famous herbal drink to cool myself off.

The famous Penang stir-fried egg and famous Penang clams.

The famous Penang steamed garoupa. Aww, so cute.

I’m guilty.

Baby chair.

A Nissan GT-R spotted back at the hotel carpark.

The hotel charges for broadband connection. Lucky for me that the Wave has a Mobile AP feature that lets me tether my data connection over WiFi up to 3 devices.

CHOWRASTAAAAA! Awesome name LOL

The Low Clan Association. I wonder how low they are. Perhaps their administrative office is underground?

Hawker uncle.

Fish chunks, before they are deep-fried.

I ordered the famous Penang three-sauce chee cheong fun while waiting for my fried fish noodles.

The not-so-famous Penang iced tea and coffee.

While (still) waiting for my noodles, I checked out the phone browser. It’s said to run on the WebKit engine, but I’m not entirely sure.

Shown above is the tab switcher in landscape mode. I still prefer Opera Mobile’s tab-switching interface.

When you hold down on a link, you are given a choice to open it in a new tab, copy the link or add it to your Bookmarks.

When you hold down on normal text, you can drag the end point to make your selection. Then the phone prompts you with a choice to copy the text, run a Google search of the phrase, or make a translation on Google Translate in a new tab.

Shown above is Google Translate with the English word “pages” to Welsh translation “dudalennau”.

Multitouch pinch-to-zoom works on the Wave browser, although text gets pixelated as you zoom in. However, the browser re-renders the text once you lift your fingers.

Dirty coffee shop table.

Then, the food arrives.

This is the famous Penang crispy apom.

Famous Penang stir-fried noodles.

Famous Penang deep-fried fish and prawns to complement the famous Penang noodles.

Beautifully deep-fried to golden brown.

The crispy-outside, soft-inside fish chunks are wonderful. You must absolutely try it.

And that concludes this post. All photos are taken with my EOS 40D and edit on-the-go with Google Picasa, then uploaded with WiFi tethering from the Samsung Wave. You can view all photos on Flickr here.