Available
now 15th November 2010
Another addition to Samsung's Bada range of smartphones, the
Samsung Wave 723 (also known as the GT-S7230) is a competent
but unremarkable device aimed at midrange consumers.
The primary hardware features of the Wave 723 are a 3.2"
240 x 400 pixel display, 5 megapixel camera, GPS, WiFi and 3.5G
support. Usefully, the Wave 723 comes with a detachable leather
style flip to protect the screen.
Bada is a pretty decent operating system, and when used in conjunction
with the capacitive touchscreen display then we would imagine this
to be a pretty pleasing experience.
Samsung are good at stills cameras in their phones, and the 5
megapixel unit comes with an LED flash, autofocus, panoramic stitching
and smile detection. Unfortunately, Samsung are pretty poor at video
capture and the Wave 723's maximum capture rate of 320 x 240
pixels at 15 frames per second is frankly pretty useless these days.
The
large 1200 mAh battery is quoted as giving up to 6 hours talktime
on 3G and 25 days standby time. The Wave 723 weighs 100 grams without
the protective flip and 114 grams when it is attached. The overall
size is 110 x 54 x 12mm.
This is a quad-band GSM phone with dual-band 900 / 2100 MHz 3G
support. The Wave 723 has a maximum download speed on HSDPA of 3.6
Mbps. WiFi support is also built-in, and the S7230 supports 802.11n
networking as well as the more common b and g protocols.
As you would expect, the Wave 723 includes a multimedia player
and also an FM radio. Media can be stored on the handset's microSD
slot with a maximum capacity of 16GB. The S7230 also includes stereo
Bluetooth 3.0.
Retailing at about €350 SIM-free, the Wave 723 isn't exactly
expensive but there is quite a lot of strong competition here, and
for this sort of money we'd probably go for one of the less powerful
Android handsets about. Overall though, this does seem to be a fairly
useful and practical smartphone if you fancy something a little
different.
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