Samsung Wave: One-touch entertainment with widgets

June 7, 2010 6:00 am

Categories: Guides Extra Tags: bada, PP, Samsung, wave

The Samsung Wave has enough high-end features to embarrass other smartphones, but it’s a good time girl at heart. It’s stacked with enough fun widgets to turn your phone into a veritable entertainment station. Read on to find out how.

Media King? The BBC iPlayer is a wonder of the modern internet age. The beeb is being painfully slow about making dedicated smartphone apps to make good use of it, but the Samsung Wave is one step ahead. It comes bundled with a link to the service that you can dump right there on your home screen.

It’s not a native Bada app, instead taking your straight to the web, but the iPlayer interface looks ace on the Wave’s screen anyway. You can stream away anything available on the iPlayer in 3G format over Wi-Fi.

Another media-savvy widget that comes pre-installed is the Music Store. It lets you search for tracks from your home screen, using a discreet search bar, and gives you some suggestions – usually new hot tracks. It’s a portal to the Samsung Music Store, but it’ll be just what you need when you get that annoyingly catchy track stuck in your head out-and-about, that will only be exorcised by a purchase.

You can also slap a widget link to the Samsung app store, featuring loads of Bada Samsung Wave apps, on a home screen. It’s just a simple button, but is the easiest way to get a daily app injection for all you app hoarders. At launch, Samsung plans to have 200 Samsung Wave apps online and ready to buy.

A look for every day of the week
If you’re the kind of person that doesn’t like to let your look become stagnant, you’ll appreciate the wallpaper widget. It’s a tiny gallery widget that only takes up around a third of a home screen but lets you browse through your Wave’s whole image gallery and set a new wallpaper with just the touch of a button.

There’s also a button that takes you to the full-screen image gallery, if a small thumbnail preview isn’t enough to choose the next backdrop for your Wave’s homescreens from. It’s the best way to change your wallpaper regularly without messing out in menu systems.

Social King
The Samsung Wave isn’t a phone that wants to keep you locked into the digital realm. It’s just as keen to put your real-life entertainment at your fingertips as well as videos, music and pics.

The Birthdays widget scours through your contacts to find out when the next birthday is coming up in the calendar. If there’s not a party on the horizon, why not arrange one?

If you have a regular gang of mates you go out with, the Buddies Now widget is perfect for finding a quick night out. It groups your favourite contacts into a flick-able carousel. You can call or text them right there from your home screen too, do you’re only ever a finger swipe away from a night out on the town.

The Samsung Wave is even better at bringing your wider social circle to your fingertips. Once you’ve setup all your social networks from within the My Accounts menu, the Feeds & Update widget is the ultimate ways to get a social networking entertainment fix. It gives you a simple stream featuring all the latest updates from your email and social networks, Facebook, Myspace and Twitter, for instant gratification.

Check out the Samsung Wave in action…

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Samsung Wave: One-touch entertainment with widgets

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