Samsung Wave review

The Samsung Wave is packing a 1500mAh battery, which we've seen on many high-end devices at the moment, and despite being massive doesn't necessarily lead to an awesome power boost.

This is usually due to poorly-written code or applications going rogue and sucking all the juice from the phone, and something that's partly putting people off going down the smartphone route.

However, it's clear that Samsung has improved this by vertically integrating the whole process to control everything from start to finish, as the Wave has a pretty good battery life, lasting around two days in normal use.

We also noticed that with the SIM card out and the Wi-Fi running, the phone will last for ages and ages - we got nearly four days with only 50% battery drain. Not that this mode is much use, but should you need to drop down to half connectivity for a while to save battery then this is a great option.

Admittedly we couldn't give the phone a full road test, as the app store is woefully under-stocked so it's impossible to see if anything would actually suck your battery dry.

But with push email, Facebook and smidgen of Twitter it easily lasted the day (much more without push notification on), so we've got hope that this could be one of the better smartphones out there when it comes to battery life.

Connections

In terms of connectivity, the Koreans have thought of everything with the Samsung Wave.

Not only does it have Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, GPS, HSPDA 7.2Mbps and a 3.5mm headphone jack that doubles a TV out - but you can also use it as a Wi-Fi hotspot as well.

Using the Mobile AP setting within the connections menu, you can set the Samsung Wave to open up the 3G connection to other devices.

It's automatically set to work with a password and WPA (not the most secure, but better than nothing in a pinch) and in our tests it worked pretty well. The first connection failed, but the second worked fine, and speed on an iPhone was adequate if not stellar.

We also like the little notification from the Samsung Wave that using this feature will use gallons of data and drain the battery pretty quickly - we're sure we'd have worked that out almost instantly, but it's nice that Samsung is being responsible.