Apple iPhone 4 vs Samsung Wave: Design, Hardware and OS

Apple iPhone 4 vs Samsung Wave: Design, Hardware and OS
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The Apple iPhone 4 is one of the best smartphones currently available and also the most popular. It is the the latest iPhone and has sold a lot of units since its launch. The Samsung Wave, on the other hand, is the first smartphone which runs the new Samsung Bada OS by Samsung. It has superb hardware specifications but the OS is new and there aren’t many applications available for the Bada platform yet.

Design and Display

Both the iPhone 4 and the Wave have great designs, but the iPhone 4’s design is much better than the Wave. It is much more stylish and looks elegant compared to the Wave. It is also slimmer and has better build quality.

The iPhone 4 has an excellent 3.5 inch capacitive touchscreen retina display with a resolution of 640 x 960 pixels, which is the highest resolution supported by any mobile phone while the Wave has a brilliant 3.3 inch Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels. The iPhone beats the Wave in terms of both size and resolution. Also the retina display slightly edges out the Wave’s Super AMOLED display. They are definitely the two best displays I’ve seen on a mobile phone.

Operating System

The Wave comes with the new Bada OS by Samsung with the TouchWiz 3.0 UI. The TouchWiz 3.0 UI is very similar to the one used by Samsung in its Android phones, thus enabling Android users to shift to the Wave easily.

The iPhone 4 comes with the latest version of the iPhone OS - iOS4.3.2. The iOS platform has more than 225,000 applications in the App Store while the Bada App Store has only about 400 applications currently. The iPhone is definitely the winner when it comes to the operating system and 3rd party applications. The Samsung Bada App store is expected to grow in terms of the number of apps but the iPhone App Store is light-years ahead of it.

The UI of the Samsung Wave is great, but not better than the iPhone’s UI. The iPhone’s UI offers a much better, consistent experience to the user.

Hardware

Both the iPhone 4 and the Samsung Wave sport the best hardware available in mobile smartphones. Both have a 1 GHz processor with 512 MB RAM. The Wave has 2 GB internal memory (390 MB available to the user, 1 GB for apps and 550 MB for messages) with support for up to 32 GB microSD cards while the iPhone 4 is available in 16 and 32 GB versions.

Multimedia

Both the iPhone 4 and the Wave have excellent cameras. The Wave has a superb 5 MP camera which has a resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels. It also has features like autofocus, geotagging, touch focus, face and smile detection etc. The iPhone 4 also has an excellent 5 MP camera with autofocus and LED flash which can capture images at a resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels too.

Both of them take excellent shots but the iPhone has a bigger image sensor which results in better picture quality. Both the Wave and the iPhone 4 can also record 720p videos at 30 FPS. They also have secondary front-facing cameras for video calls, but the Facetime iPhone application is a much better video calling solution. Both of them are almost comparable in this department.

They both have excellent music playback quality and the video playback is also superb. The Wave can play 720p DivX, XviD, MKV videos directly which the iPhone can’t.

Connectivity

Both the Apple iPhone 4 and the Samsung Wave support all the standard connectivity options like GPRS, EDGE, 3G HSDPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth with A2DP, GPS etc. They also support tethering so that you can connect your computers to your mobile phones to use their data connection.

The Samsung Wave offers excellent network reception while the iPhone has had some network signal quality issues.

Conclusion

Both the Samsung Wave and the iPhone 4 are really good smartphones. However they fall in very different price ranges. The Samsung Wave is a budget smartphone which is priced at nearly half the price of the iPhone 4. If you are an advanced smartphone user who uses a lot of 3rd party apps and games, then go with the iPhone 4. But if you are just looking for some basic apps and a cheaper alternative, go with the Samsung Wave.

You could also try out an Android phone, check out this list of the <strong>Top 10 Android Smartphones</strong>.

References

Image Credit: Image provided by author