Samsung Wave hits European shores
Samsung's first smartphone to run its Bada operating system, the Samsung Wave, starts shipping in European countries, but don't expect it to make a big splash in North America.
We got our first glimpse at the
Those countries include the United Kingdom, Germany, and France, and Samsung plans to bring the Wave to Southeast Asia, China, the Middle East and Africa, and Latin America. However, don't really expect to see the Wave hitting North American shores too soon.
As we learned at MWC, Bada is an evolution of the middleware that's been on Samsung's phones all along and has such features as integrated contacts, a unified in-box, a push calendar, social networking, and its own app store. Bada is meant to bring that smartphone experience to everyone, regardless of cost or geographic location, so it will particularly impact emerging markets where smartphones aren't normally subsidized by carriers and thus cost a premium to own, unlike here in the U.S.
That's not to say that the quad-band GSM smartphone will never come to the States and when and if it does, the Wave certainly has a number of great features, such as a Super AMOLED 3.3-inch WVGA touch screen, a 1GHz processor, and a 5-megapixel camera with HD video recording. It also ships with a Dolfin browser and is the first handset to use Bluetooth 3.0 and Wi-Fi 802.11n. Pricing information was not released at this time.