Australia will catch the Samsung Wave, powered by the manufacturer’s own Bada OS and accompanied by Samsung’s app store, in the middle of this year.
MWC 2010, Barcelona | In what could represent a first step away from Microsoft’s ailing and failing Windows Mobile platform, as well as Symbian, Korean colossus Samsung has unveilled the first smartphone running Samsung’s own Bada operating system.
Introduced overnight at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, the Samsung Wave – which the company’s mobile chief JK Shin called “Samsung’s mobile masterpiece” – is a multitouch phone expected to debut in Australia around the middle of this year.
Standout handset features include a super-bright 3.3 inch AMOLED screen clocked to 800 x 480 pixels and a 1GHz processor (rumoured to be an amped-up version of the ARM chip used in the iPhone). On the multimedia menu is s
upport for Flash, DivX/XviD and 720p HD video, with storage options of 2GB and 8GB in-built and a microSD card slot for wafers up to a further 32GB.
The Bada OS presents itself as an adaption of Samsung’s TouchWiz UI – indeed, the press spiel spruiks it as containing TouchWiz 3.0 – with multiple home screens and a neat ‘Social Hub’ mode which integrates instant messaging, Web-based email and updates from social networking sites into a single page for each contact in the Wave’s address book. There’s likewise a single integrated inbox.
APC took one of the first Wave phones for a quick spin and found the screen to be every bit as bright and vibrant as promised, with colours popping off the screen. The OS itself was snappy and smoothly responsive, although it also struck us as being a little uneven in parts – some screens were crisp and clean, others seemed a little too ‘colourful’ and fun.
“Bada is the key driver to our smartphone strategy”, Shin said, and would be accompanied by an expansion of the Samsung Apps online store from its current base of the UK, Italy and France – where it presently offers a limited range of apps for Samsung’s Symbian-based phones – to “more than 50 countries”. This would likely be in concert with the Wave’s debut in each country.
David Flynn is attending Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as a guest of Samsung