Samsung Wave 3 review

Is Samsung riding the crest of a wave with its latest Bada smartphone?

Samsung Wave III S8600
Samsung are currently riding a wave of smartphone success - sorry

Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.

With such a large screen web browsing on the Samsung Wave III ought to be a real treat, and indeed it is. Four inches of real estate and 480 x 800 pixels make for plenty of detail when viewing web pages and you can often read headlines without having to zoom in.

Samsung wave iii web page full screen tall

Text reflowing is only partially successful. It only works when you do a double tap for zooming. When you pinch for a closer look text reflowing goes out the window and so at higher zoom levels we found we needed to do a fair bit of scrolling to read web pages.

Samsung wave iii text reflow on double tap

test reflow on pinch to zoom

You can open multiple browser windows and shift between them using a button at the bottom of the screen to get to a nice carousel like display which makes flitting about really fast and effective.

Samsung wave iii multiple browser windows

The processor runs at 1.4 GHz and it had no trouble at all rendering web pages we visited quickly and efficiently. On some smartphones we have to wait for our own rather complex TechRadar pages to open, but not here.

We were disappointed with Flash support though. We had trouble getting embedded Flash to run on the Wave II, and the same trouble here. We couldn't find a Flash client in the Samsung app store, so we were left video-less at some web sites.

Samsung wave iii no flash support

At least YouTube didn't let us down and watching streaming video in wide format was a treat.

Samsung wave iii youtube