Samsung Wave 3, Wave M and Wave Y weave Bada 2 magic

Samsung's Wave 3, Wave M and Wave Y have had their wrappings ripped off, with the trio of smart phones all equipped with the firm's freshly minted Bada 2.0 operating system. Bada is Samsung's own OS, accented on user-friendliness rather than apps and features.

Heading up the handset troika is the Wave 3, pictured above, whose existence was leaked last week. Bada's new flagship phone, it stacks up reasonably well on the feature and specs front. There's a 1.4GHz processor squeezed into its skinny 9.9mm anodised aluminium body, 3GB of memory (plus a 32GB microSD slot) and a 5-megapixel camera, but the star of the show is the screen, a 4-inch AMOLED number.

The Wave 3 sports Samsung's Social Hub, which helpfully arranges messages and updates from all your social media contacts (including MySpace friends if you're trapped in 2007) in a single tidy stream, as well as syncing your calendars into one uber-calendar. There's also the Music Hub store if you want to buy and download songs over the air.

Moving on, the Wave M has the distinction of being the first phone with ChatON, Samsung's new BBM-baiting instant messaging service. There's Social Hub too, and a 3.65-inch tempered glass screen. The M is also NFC compatible (if that ever comes to the UK). M stands for Magical, according to Samsung's bonkers-barmy new naming convention, and means it'll probably be quite cheap.

Last and definitely least is the Wave Y -- meaning Young, not wavey -- an entry-level smart phone with Social Hub, ChatON, Music Hub and "folder management". When Samsung lists that as a major feature one suspects the phone might not be a mind-blower, but there you go.

Powering all three Waves is Samsung's new Bada 2.0 OS, which adds multi-tasking, voice recognition, support for NFC and Wi-Fi Direct and a handful of other bells and whistles to the platform.

The Samsung Wave 3, Wave M and Wave Y will all be on show at the IFA tech-fest in Berlin later this week, so expect us to have given them a poke, and possibly a stroke, in a few days' time.