We are going to see lots of mobile phone news coming from Barcelona this week with the Mobile World Congress event kicking off today. One of the first pieces of news comes from Samsung as they announced their first bada-based phone, the Wave. You may recall that Samsung announced their own operating system in December, called bada. bada takes the familiar Samsung TouchWIZ user interface to the operating system level and the Wave is designed to show off what Samsung can do with its own operating system. I have to admit, the Wave is a very nice looking device with some high end power and features, but I have never been much of a fan of TouchWIZ.
The Samsung Wave is made from a single piece of aluminum with a glass 3.3 inch Super AMOLED 800×480 pixel resolution display. It is powered by a 1GHz processor and appears to be similar to my fantastic Google Nexus One device. The TouchWiz 3.0 UI has the ability to be customized by the user, has an integrated phonebook (think Nokia Maemo and Palm webOS), and supports full multi-tasking capability. Social networking applications are a focus of the device too. The Wave is also the first smartphone to incorporate Bluetooth 3.0 and 802.11n wireless technologies. The Wave will be available worldwide in April 2010. As I have said many times before, the smartphone market is still small so there is room for plenty of players and I am pretty impressed by what Samsung is showing here with the Wave and bada.
