Do you know which was the first phone with a Super AMOLED display? Some of you may have answered “the original Galaxy S”, but that is not the case – if you read our story of OLED displays on mobile phones you will know that it was the Samsung S8500 Wave, which beat the Galaxy S to market by two months.
Back then we called this a “modest retail package” – if only we knew what was coming
Or maybe you answered correctly because you still remember the Wave phones and the OS they ran – Bada (Korean for “ocean”). It was a precursor to Tizen, the OS that runs on Samsung smart TVs today and used to be a major part of the company’s smartwatches too (though that seems to have come to an end with the Galaxy Watch4 series, which switched to Google’s Wear OS).
Meet the Samsung S8500 Wave – the first phone with a Super AMOLED display
Let’s rewind a bit. Maemo was a Linux-based operating system for mobile devices (“internet tablets” and smartphones) developed by Nokia. Intel had a similar system dubbed Moblin. Then the two tech giants decided to combine their efforts into MeeGo (which is part of what made the Nokia N9 awesome).
But then Nokia abandoned Intel to pursue other love interests (you know the one). So, Intel and others – Samsung among them – started the Tizen project as a sequel to MeeGo. Samsung had its own Linux-based OS at the time, Bada, which was eventually merged into Tizen in 2013. The company has been the main user of Tizen ever since. The family tree of Linux-based mobile operating systems is convoluted to say the least.
The Wave was a beautiful phone • It even had 3.5 mm jacks and camera buttons
Back to the S8500 Wave. Other than the OS, it was like a smaller Galaxy S. It ran on the same Hummingbird chipset (1.0 GHz Cortex-A8 CPU), an early Samsung chip predating the Exynos line. The phone had the same 5 MP camera with autofocus and 720p video recording too, same 1,500 mAh battery even.
The screen was smaller, 3.3 inches, than that of the Galaxy S (4.0″), though it had the same resolution – 480 x 800 px. Like on the Galaxy, this display enjoyed the protection of first generation Gorilla Glass.
And while we had seen AMOLED displays before, this one was special. With no gap between the display itself and the protective glass (this is part of what made it “Super” AMOLED), the whole interface appeared to float on the surface of the glass. The display had vibrant colors and true blacks, of course. Here it is compared to some high profile competition:
The first Super AMOLED display showed great promise
The Wave and the Galaxy S may have ran different OSes, it wasn’t immediately obvious – both were skinned with TouchWiz, the UI Samsung used for most of its phones (starting with its touch-operated featurephones). The hardware was similar enough that industrious developers managed to get Android running, all the way up to 4.4 KitKat (2013). Even the Galaxy S itself officially only got up to 2.3 Gingerbread.
TouchWiz made both Bada and Android look the same
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