Samsung Wave S8500 review: The phone that debuted Super AMOLED and launched the Bada OS.
The Super AMOLED debut.
The Samsung Wave S8500 was a technical landmark — the first phone with a Super AMOLED display and the first with Bluetooth 3.0 — and the launch vehicle for Samsung's own Bada OS. Bada never found apps and was eventually folded into Tizen, but the Wave's hardware firsts endure.
01Display
70/100At 70/100 this is one of the strongest display showings among flagship phones of 2010 — 8 points above the cohort average.
02Camera
54/10054/100 — right at the average for flagship phones of 2010.
03Performance
52/10052/100 puts it above the 49-point average for flagship phones of 2010.
04Battery
56/10056/100 — right at the average for flagship phones of 2010.
05Build
70/100At 70/100 this is one of the strongest build showings among flagship phones of 2010 — 12 points above the cohort average.
06Value
56/100At 56/100 this is one of the strongest value showings among flagship phones of 2010 — 11 points above the cohort average.
- First phone with a Super AMOLED display.
- First phone with Bluetooth 3.0.
- Fast 1 GHz Hummingbird chip.
- Premium stainless-steel build.
- Bada OS had almost no apps.
- WVGA on a small screen.
- Bada was discontinued in 2013.
- Mono speaker.
How this review is built: every section score, spec row and comparison on this page comes from SpecEagle's tracked catalogue — scores weight measured specs against the 50-phone cohort of flagship devices released around the same time. We don't publish invented lab anecdotes. Spot an error? .