The idea behind Bada wasn’t necessarily a bad one, but the platform was let down last year by the fact that Samsung only released one handset using the mobile OS. That’s all going to change this year, with Samsung announcing the Wave 578 handset, which adds NFC to the mix. There’s no guarantee it will launch in Australia though…
The new handset looks somewhat similar to the older handset, with a 3.2-inch touchscreen, 3.2MP rear camera with VGA front camera, HSPA support on 900/2100 MHz spectrums and Samsung’s social networking social hub.
But the big feature that makes this phone interesting is NFC, a feature we haven’t seen a lot of in smartphones other than the Nexus S. Of course, without the infrastructure to support NFC, the feature’s pretty much dead in the water, but having the hardware capability is half the battle for pushing NFC forward.
The press release for the Wave 578 says that the phone will hit France in May and then roll out through Europe, CIS, South East Asia, India, Middle East and China. Locally, the position is: “Samsung are currently reviewing local market interest in the Samsung Wave 578 and will share any news on operator uptake once a decision has been made.”
Samsung also announced the second generation of the Bada platform, which introduces support for NFC, HTML 5 and WAC, plus multitasking an voice recognition. It’s not clear at this stage whether the new Wave handsetwill run on the new bada platform – the spec sheet says Bada 1.1, but the NFC capability is only in v2.0. We’ll update when Samsung clarifies for us…
[Samsung]