Barcelona -- Samsung has launched its brand new cellphone operating system, named Bada, at the Mobile World Congress. The first handset is the Wave, a rather sleek-looking sliver of glass that is all screen, just like you'd expect from a modern smartphone.
On paper, the Wave looks great: A 3.3-inch AMOLED touch-screen, Bluetooth 3.0, 1GHz processor, 5MP camera, assisted GPS and video support for most of your legal and illegal movies. When you pick it up, though, things aren't so great.
First, there's no multi-touch, which doesn't sound like a big deal but when you're used to it, you expect it. The screen is pretty sensitive, although the (suspiciously iPhone-like) on-screen keyboard is rather hard to type on and appears to have no auto-correction.
The big problem comes with the software itself. It's snappy enough on that fast chip, but - like all Samsung phones before it - the Bada-powered Wave is completely un-intuitive to use. You keep finding yourself in a page with no easy way out. Hitting the home button on the front face (flanked by hardware call and hang-up buttons) will usually take you back to the main screen, but not always.
The unit I tried was having some trouble with memory, too. I tried to fire up the browser and an out-of-memory message appeared. I had to close some apps. This meant a welcome trip into the task manager, which you see below. It looks like a gridded version of Mobile Safari's page selection screen, and worked great. Welcome to cellphone multi-tasking.
The Wave is probably best for movie watching, with that lovely hi-res 800 x 480 screen. For web browsing, you'll be zooming in: That hi-res screen means text is almost impossible to read otherwise.
