Samsung Wave review

Samsung offers its most powerful phone yet

The definitive Samsung Wave review
The definitive Samsung Wave review

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Like the other high end smartphones on offer, the Samsung Wave offers a pretty nifty internet experience, with full HTML browsing offered.

The large and expansive screen is great for viewing full web pages, and the Wi-Fi and 3G both offer a very speedy experience when looking at mobile or lower-complexity pages.

Samsung wave

The Samsung Wave apparently supports Flash video, although attempts to play any video usually end in failure or at best a very choppy video, which also makes heavier web pages stumble quite comprehensively on the Wave.

There's none of the instant access element we've grown used to with the better smartphones on the market, meaning we're often left waiting for too long to simply check a simple news story.

Search is built right into the Samsung Wave, with not only a Google widget on offer for the home screen, but also the aforementioned 'double tap' search screen available too.

Not only can your scroll through Google from here, but also Bing and Twitter too, making it a pretty comprehensive search facility indeed.

While on the pre-production model, the Samsung Wave would always convert the page into a 'mobile-optimised' version - thankfully that's gone from this sample.

Samsung wave

A real plus point should also be the ability to pinch and zoom into web pages... none of this 'one finger zoom' nonsense Samsung threw at us with the Jet.

But there's no text reflow on offer here, meaning once you've zoomed in a bit the text stays in the same illegible columns unless you zoom in and constantly swipe the screen left and right to discover new columns.

Samsung wave

The poor Flash experience notwithstanding (after all, the iPhone manages just fine) we're only mildly impressed with the internet on the Samsung Wave. With so many people after a phone for 'good internet' these days, the experience should be top notch.

We've no doubt that Samsung will improve it in the near future, but with such a strong processor on board we frankly expected more than a slightly improved internet experience from a feature phone.

Gareth Beavis
Formerly Global Editor in Chief

Gareth has been part of the consumer technology world in a career spanning three decades. He started life as a staff writer on the fledgling TechRadar, and has grown with the site (primarily as phones, tablets and wearables editor) until becoming Global Editor in Chief in 2018. Gareth has written over 4,000 articles for TechRadar, has contributed expert insight to a number of other publications, chaired panels on zeitgeist technologies, presented at the Gadget Show Live as well as representing the brand on TV and radio for multiple channels including Sky, BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera. Passionate about fitness, he can bore anyone rigid about stress management, sleep tracking, heart rate variance as well as bemoaning something about the latest iPhone, Galaxy or OLED TV.