Samsung has finally launched the Bada mobile OS and the first ever phone to run on it at the Mobile World Congress happening at Barcelona, Spain right now. The phone is called Wave, just as the rumors said it was. Officially it is the Wave S8500 — the first phone to have the Bada OS. As a piece of a hardware, it is easy to see that it is pretty good. But when it comes to the OS, opinions don’t seem to differ much amongst the attendees. The general vibe is ‘meh’ and worse. But that doesn’t mean that the phone does not have potential. Anything that has that great a screen is bound to have some potential!

The S8500′s screen is ‘Super AMOLED’ screen and everyone who has held the phone, has loved the scree. It has really rich colors, deep blacks and a really wide viewing angle. The screen measures 3.3inch diagonal and has a resolution of 400×800 pixels. The phone is powered by an 1GHz processor, which has to be the SnapDragon. The responsiveness thus is reported to be ‘super fast’ at times. And for such a powerful phone, it is really slim. Electric Pig’s Ben Sillis puts the phone at the same level as the Nexus One from Google at slimness and he thinks that the screen is even better. Well, this is a better version of AMOLED screen and Samsung has good experience in the field making TV’s and computer displays.

The design will remind you a lot of OMNIA II and that is because it has the same sharp angles in its design and the Diamond shapes. It is basically Samsung’s signature by now and can be found in some other phones as well.

The rest of the features are standard issue — Bluetooth, 3G, WiFi, etc. There’s an 8GB onboard memory and support for up to 32GB extra via an SD card. It is good that it supports SD cards instead of the usual MicroSD. Although I do not understand why they chose a bulky card format as compared to the MicroSD which is more common for phones.

The Bada OS has not won any followers or converts at the launch. Those who have handled it say that it is still buggy and the TouchWiz 3.0 UI barely shows improvements. The browser apparently needs work and the delay after triggering an app is still in place, which can be quite annoying. However, Samsung has also introduced integrated social networking features in to the OS, which they hope will give them some sort of an edge.

Price is still unknown, expected to be high. Arrival is due in April this year.

Whilst you wait for more details, here’s a video done by the fine people at ElectricPig.

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