At a June 15th CommunicAsia conference in Singapore, Samsung announced the Wave 2 and the accompanying Wave 2 Pro, two new smartphones running on Samsung’s Bada open mobile platform, making good on an earlier promise to increase the volume and selection of Bada-based phones in an attempt to create a solid community and support to provide more applications and functionality to the OS. Hoping to replicate the success of the Wave 2 and Wave 2 Pro predecessor, Samsung has opted follow a similar formula in an attempt to gain an increased market penetration for the Bada platform. JK Shin, President and head of Samsung Electronics Mobile Communications Business has said, “I expect significant growth of Bada smartphones volume thanks to the launch of mass market targeting Wave 2 and Wave 2 Pro. We will continue to invest in our open Bada platform and offer a wide range of choices and experiences for consumers.”
Though the Wave 2 Pro has adopted a similar concept and design to that used in the Wave, Samsung has made some alteration to bring it into a lower price range, increasing availability. Primarily intended to allow students, as well as teenagers and young adults in general, to have cheap, easy access to mobile phones designed for social networking, the Wave 2 provides consumers with the ability to connect with your friends from nearly anywhere without the excessive pricing of many of today’s latest smartphones. Currently, the Wave 2 Pro is slated for an August release in Russia and South East Asia, and Samsung’s press release indicates it will be available in three different colours: Pearl White, Metallic Black, and Romantic Pink. Official pricing has yet to be announced, but given the target audience, the mobile devices feature set, and Samsung’s desire to compete with Nokia in the lower price points, the Wave 2 Pro is expected to be very affordable.
Built on the open Bada platform, the Wave 2 Pro comes with the integrated Samsung apps store which offers a wide range of applications and is accessible from either a computer or the mobile phone itself. The selection includes an ever-increasing number of games, social networking apps, navigation utilities, health and lifestyle applications, and e-book readers and data that make it possible to add the functionality you desire. Once you find an app you want, you can easily download it to your phone directly, or download it to your PC and sync it to your phone without installing any additional software. Integrated Java support also allows you to utilise apps not created specifically for the Bada platform to expand the functionality of the phone as well, making many games and productivity tools available for your use.
The Wave 2 Pro features a social networking aggregator, similar in style to popular services like HTC‘s Friend Stream or Motorola‘s MOTOBLUR that collects all of your social networking info and provides it to you in a single, central location to make it easy to keep track of your many social circles. Known as the Social Hub, the aggregator gathers info from social networking services, contact details, and email accounts, allowing you to easily manage your accounts, update your information or read someone else’s without having to log on to each individual network. Prepackaged Facebook and Twitter applications provide home screen access to tweets and Facebook status updates, allowing you to see what’s going on with your friends and family at a glance.
The Wave 2 Pro also features support for SMS text messaging, MMS multimedia messaging, instant messaging, RSS feeds, and multiple email accounts, so you can keep in touch with those who are most important to you while you’re on the go, as well as receive the latest updates instantly. While the Wave 2 was limited to an on-screen soft key QWERTY keyboard, the Wave 2 Pro has a slide-out four-row QWERTY keyboard to contribute to its social networking functionality, making it much quicker to type messages and status updates from your mobile device. The Wave 2 Pro also utilises Samsung’s TouchWiz 3.0 UI to offer basic touchscreen functionality for intuitive navigation and interaction. Likewise, an onboard accelerometer provides auto-rotate functionality so you can easily switch between landscape and portrait modes for convenient viewing of websites, text, or images. Measuring a fairly slim and small 10.9 x 5.5 x 1.5 cm, the Wave 2 Pro fits into the hand fairly nicely to make interaction comfortable and natural, and the sleek, modern look makes it appealing for the aesthetically-minded.
Though the Wave 2 Pro was developed with social networking in mind, it has a number of entertainment features available as well. The 3.2” 240×400 TFT LCD capacitive touch screen is capable of displaying 256,000 colours, and serves as a fairly good medium for displaying images and video. Listen to your favourite music in popular audio formats (mp3, wav, eAAC+) using the Wave 2 Pro’s music player, or listen to your favourite radio stations from your mobile device with the Wave 2 Pro’s built-in FM radio support. The Wave 2 Pro also has Bluetooth A2DP connectivity and a 3.5mm jack to let you listen to your music in stereo via wireless headphones or traditional analogue headphones.
Along with its music playback capabilities, The Wave 2 Pro features a 3-megapixel camera that can be used to take pictures and record SD video, as well as an accompanying image editor to allow you to make some simple alterations to your images. The Wave 2 Pro’s integrated GPS support allows you to geo tag your photos for quick and easy indexing, allowing you to sort your images by location to help you find that image you’re looking for. The Wave 2 can also play back MP4 H.263 and H.264 video so you can bring video clips with you wherever you go. To help you store al of your media, the Wave 2 Pro features 80MB of internal storage and the microSD expansion slot supports and additional 16GB of external memory which allows you nearly unlimited storage via interchangeable cards. Like the Wave 2, the Wave 2 Pro lacks broadband 3G access, but the 802.11 b/g wireless connectivity and 2G EDGE/GPRS support allows you to surf the web and stay connected to friends and family from nearly anywhere. Find the best Samsung Wave 2 Pro deals on Best Mobile Contracts or read some other opinions on the Samsung Wave 2 Pro reviews page.
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