Samsung Shows New Bada Wave Phones

Samsung has unveiled three new Wave smartphones running its own Bada operating system, aimed at the social networking generation.

The new phones are the Wave525, the Wave533 and the Wave575, which all include 3.2-inch touchscreen displays, 100MB of internal memory and 3.2 megapixel cameras. The 525 and the 575 both have slim 11.9mm bodies and come in black, white or pink, while the 533 has a slide-out qwerty keyboard.

The phones all offer easy access to Samsung’s integrated messaging platform, which includes SMS, email, SNS, and instant messaging. This was also one of the major selling points of Samsung’s first Wave smartphone, released in February.

“The Samsung Wave family will give users an optimised smartphone experience that suits their lifestyle,” said JK Shin, President and Head of Mobile Communications Business at Samsung Electronics. “These three new devices in the Samsung Wave family represent Samsung’s commitment to delivering choice for smartphone users and ultimately democratising the smartphone market.”

The Samsung Wave525 is currently available in Russia, operating on EDGE networks, while the Wave533 will be launched in Russia in late October. These will then be rolled out gradually to CIS (the Commonwealth of former Soviet states), Europe, Latin America, Asia, Middle East and Africa. The 3G HSDPA Wave575 will initially launch in Sweden in mid-November.

Samsung’s Bada OS

Samsung launched Bada, which means ‘ocean’ in Korean, in December 2009, with the intention of turning conventional customers into smartphone users by providing more cost-effective smartphones.

However, according to Rob Bamforth, principal communication, collaboration and convergence analyst at Quocirca, Samsung’s chances of reshaping the smartphone market with Bada are fairly slim.

“It might be cheaper for them to have their own OS in terms of intellectual property, but there are plenty of good feature handsets that offer a cheaper alternative to smartphones,” said Bamforth. “With Apple, Android, Symbian and even Windows Mobile, the key questions developers and ISVs [independent software vendors] will be asking is, what’s in it for me?”

Windows Phone 7

The news comes ahead of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 press conference, scheduled for today. Samsung has been named as the leading phone make to support Microsoft’s new mobile platform, although no devices have been revealed yet.

“The addition of Windows Phone 7 devices to Samsung’s smartphone portfolio is a significant milestone,” said Simon Stanford, Head of Mobile, Samsung UK and Ireland, in September.  “Samsung’s new Windows Phone 7 based smartphones will play a key role in reinforcing Samsung’s leadership in the smartphone market and commitment to providing a range of devices across a variety of platforms.”

Samsung has also committed to devices running Google’s Android OS, and recently launched its Galaxy Tab tablet device, running Android 2.2.