The Samsung Wave marks a bold new move from Samsung: the introduction of its own smartphone OS, Bada. But in an already over crowded market (iPhone OS, Android, Symbian, Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry OS, webOS), is this a welcome addition, or the beginning of unnecessary fragmentation? And should developers flock to Bada or concentrate their efforts elsewhere? Read on and find out in our Samsung Wave review: Bada section.

Samsung’s been talking up Bada as a means to “democratize” smartphones: a worthy crusade for sure, and to give Samsung its due, it certainly does make the Samsung Wave easy to use for newcomers. But the flip side is that Bada brings almost nothing new to the table, mimicking the best parts of iPhone OS, Android and Symbian and little more. Whereas the last two major smartphone operating systems unveiled (webOS and Windows Phone 7) innovated with a new focus on either multitasking or contacts, Bada doesn’t push the boat out in a big way.

For starters, Bada on the Samsung Wave feels eerily similar to Samsung’s mid-range touchscreen phones, like the Samsung Monte or Genio Slide. That’s because it still incorporates the same widget homescreen set up of Samsung’s TouchWiz UI of old, and even some of the same exact widgets (The BBC iPlayer widget is still just a shortcut, and the Google apps bar hasn’t changed either).

Dig a little deeper though and you can see Bada on the Samsung Wave certainly is a smarter affair. The drop down tray that can be pulled from the top of the screen stores your notifications, just like Android, but also hides the music player controls while you’re surfing the web and whatnot, and a toggle for Wi-Fi, two really helpful additions. Samsung’s one finger zoom has also been ditched in Bada on the Samsung Wave, in favour of pinch to zoom multitouch gestures on websites and photos, which work just as smoothly as the tilt from portrait to landscape mode – not as quick as on an iPhone, but just as seamless.



 The list of ways Bada emulates these rival platforms goes on, too: copy and paste works very similar to the cursor dragging on iPhone OS, while multitasking is achieved by holding down the middle button to bring up the tray, similar to Android and Symbian, but with a useful “End all applications” button.



Here in lies both the Samsung Wave’s biggest selling point and its biggest flaw. Bada gently tweaks and improves upon its rivals with little features to create something that’s genuinely easy to understand – but smartphone veterans will notice what Bada lacks too, particularly when they come to adding contacts.

Samsung, like everyone else in the sector, is now bringing social networking to the fore. You can import your Facebook and Twitter contacts to your address book (But not Gmail, tut), which is great on paper, but not particularly well implemented, since the Samsung Wave won’t try and suggest linking names together for you: you’ll have to do it manually. We’d also be very wary of using Twitter at all if you’re following people in the four digits rather than two or three: our Twitter account syncing caused massive slowdown on the Samsung Wave, despite the 1GHz processor.

Once they’re connected you can see what everyone is saying through a Feeds & Update widget (Inertial scrolling through it would have been nice, but this is a minor quibble) – or you can fire up the individual apps. The preloaded Twitter Bada app is fine if you only have one account, but the Facebook Bada app is a bit limited, since you can’t create events through it, even though your Facebook calendar will sync to Bada. More annoyingly, we couldn’t get the IM client to work whatever we tried, and for some reason, the Samsung Wave won’t tolerate it being open while music is played at the same time, which could be a dealbreaker for some.



That aside, we are impressed with the potential Bada has if developers get onboard. There’s little on the Bada Samsung Apps store right now, (The only name we’ve heard of is TuneWiki), but the preloaded Gameloft racing title Asphalt 5 looked fantastic, with crispy 3D graphics on a par with the iPhone.

The question is of course, whether other developers will follow suit: some of the Bada apps we tried on the Samsung Wave, like Free Tube Map, were slow, poor, and put simply, rushed. That of course could change: Samsung has developer days planned to school coders in crafting proper Bada apps. It deserves to change too: Bada is easy to use, and for someone looking for a phone that looks nice, sucks in their social streams and plays just about any media file you throw at it (Even high def MKV files played perfectly on it, so hats off to Samsung on this front).




Whether it will or not is another matter entirely: look at how Palm’s webOS App Catalog languishes while the iPhone App Store and Android Market explode. That’s beside the point for some people though: for the undemanding, Bada makes the Samsung Wave a perfect ready made smartphone. For those looking to customise however, it might be best to hold out to see if Samsung’s massive existing market share can gain Bada third party traction where others have failed.

Samsung Wave review unit supplied by Mobiles.co.uk