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Samsung’s bada-powered Wave finally hits Kenya.

I’ve been waiting for this news for sometime and its finally here! Samsung today launched the much anticipated and bada-powered Samsung Wave handset (S8500) in conjunction with Safaricom in Kenya. The Samsung Wave is the first mobile handset to be released on Samsung’s new, open mobile platform, bada, which is the cornerstone of Samsung’s bold commitment to provide a smartphone for everyone.

The Samsung Wave has a Super AMOLED 3.3” display that makes its screen visually stunning, a Social Hub to bring you closer to your contacts and connections, and TouchWiz 3.0 for an intuitive and hugely customizable user interface. The Wave’s high-speed CPU ensures swift, smooth application experiences and multi-tasking, making the device an always-on mobile multimedia companion. The Samsung Wave has been built to offer users an unrivalled level of performance, customization and choice in how they connect with their world.


“The Samsung Wave truly demonstrates our commitment to deliver rich, connected and innovative smartphone experiences to everyone,” said  Robert Ngeru, Samsung Electronics Nairobi Office Deputy Managing Director. “Samsung Wave sees our platform vision become a reality. For the first time, developers have the freedom to create applications across multiple platforms, for consumption on a huge range of devices. In the Wave, our developer partners can see the ocean of opportunity that is offered by the bada mobile platform and our device technology,” he said.

“We are very excited to have partnered with Safaricom to make this product nationally available for Kenyans. The Samsung wave will be retailing exclusively at Safaricom outlets countrywide for Ksk  29,999 and will come with 100MB Free data and Kes. 1,000.00 free airtime.” he added.

Super AMOLED – Seeing is believing

With the Samsung Wave, seeing really is believing as it features the world’s first Super AMOLED display; delivering an unrivalled screen experience on a smartphone. The Super AMOLED offers much brighter, clearer, and less reflective AMOLED OnCell display, featuring a high resolution WVGA (800×480 pixels) screen with mDNIe (mobile Digital Natural Image engine) technology. DNIe technology is proven display technology which incorporated to Samsung’s LCD TV and LED TV lineups. With a free viewing angle and super fast response, the Samsung Wave display provides superb image quality for viewing both videos and photos.

Social Hub – my communities at my hand

Social Hub has been designed from the ground up to seamlessly integrate all major portal’s email, IM and SNS services directly into the Samsung Wave. With its TouchWiz 3.0 UI, it provides users easy-flow integrated experience of messaging, managing contacts and viewing calendar events. Social Hub is powered by the amazing push technology to deliver email messages, calendar events and SNS updates in real-time.

TouchWiz 3.0 UI – new and improved

The Samsung Wave provides superior levels of choice to all users via its fully customizable menus and home-page. For those who demand access to their social networking sites at all times, the device allows users to change the layout of the home-page to allow instant access to Twitter, Facebook and a host of other social networking services. For those who love music, the device home-page can be turned into an intuitive media player; while for those who take and share a lot of photos, the home page can be customized to feature favourite images. Users will also benefit from Quick Panel, a way of prioritizing and aggregating applications into one screen for instant access.

With its eye-catchingly brilliant screen, Samsung’s latest TouchWiz 3.0 user interface gives a tactile, intuitive user experience, and includes iconic new features such as motion UI, smart unlock and customizable widget screen.

Speed, performance and beauty

The Samsung Wave benefits from a superb 1GHz processor which offers users the best graphic performance available today. Its speed makes the touch screen user interface incredibly responsive and intuitive and, more importantly, means that the 3D and memory-intensive graphic and video performance is unsurpassed.

The Samsung Wave is also one of the most attractive devices to launch so far this year; its seamless, streamlined body has no parting or harsh lines and features a beautiful curved, tempered glass display which perfectly complements and enhances the vividness of the Super AMOLED display. And with anti-smudge technology, those greasy thumb prints are a thing of the past.

Multimedia Features and Connectivity

Multi-codec support for DivX and Xvid, and support for 5.1 surround sound delivery transforms the device into a personal entertainment system and HD video decoding and recording capabilities make the Samsung Wave an outstanding device for capturing, sharing and viewing video.

For the first time in the world, Samsung Wave is incorporated Bluetooth® 3.0 and WiFi 802.11n standard.

SamsungApps: Unlimited Expandability

Samsung’s bada platform allows mobile users to simply and easily download an abundance of applications from Samsung Apps, an integrated application store accessible from the device and online. Featuring a wealth of games, navigation, social networking, e-book, health and lifestyle applications, SamsungApps gives users instant access to a huge choice of mobile experiences.

Samsung established its mobile application ecosystem through the launch of Samsung Mobile Innovator in 2008 and the Samsung Application Seller Site followed by Samsung Application Store as another key element of this offering. Already launched in the UK, France, Italy, Singapore, Germany, Brazil and China, this will be expanded to more than 50 countries all over the world in 2010.

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9 Comments

  1. Kafai
    August 10, 2010 at 7:38 am — Reply

    Do they need brand ambassadors? I offer self. Great review, phone added to wish list.

    • August 11, 2010 at 2:52 am — Reply

      @kafai. Yes. Spread the Samsung gospel! 🙂

  2. george
    August 16, 2010 at 6:15 am — Reply

    does samsung mobile have a similar platform like nokia that allows local mobile application uploads?
    i would like to know if their is one that can take a local online platform that allows easy shopping without charge to users

    • August 16, 2010 at 8:15 am — Reply

      bada is their mobile application platform. Its similar to what nokia have but still a work in progress. I heard from a reliable source that they will be launching three apps bada for Kenya.

  3. August 18, 2010 at 12:44 pm — Reply

    I have already got myself a Wave and the screen is absolutely stunning and I love the speed.
    I would love to see more apps especially local ones launched for the Bada platform though. The only useful news portal is the Aljazeera one.
    Another drawback is the Safaricom SIM menu is hidden at the bottom of the settings menu, I wish Safaricom could come up with an MPESA widget which can be put on the home screen it would make the phone that much easier to use. Do you know anyone who can develop this at Safcom?
    .-= kirima´s last blog ..Dragon flies =-.

  4. David
    September 30, 2010 at 7:02 am — Reply

    Cant get MMS on his phone

  5. November 2, 2010 at 4:04 am — Reply

    Sharing my experience, am not sure if its the bada OS or the hardware, I bought a Samsung wave S5253(12hours old) and I can’t use it anymore because it just keeps restarting had to take it back to the dealers.

    BTW I didn’t do nor attempt a firmware upgrade (so it isn’t a firmware upgrade failure), all I did was connect it to Kies, put some mp3s and the phone go possessed by the restarting demon.

    I hope to get working phone soon, for those planning to buy the same all the best, its a gamble.

  6. Clive
    August 11, 2011 at 7:59 am — Reply

    Moses, great review . . .apart from safaricom . . . is there another place where i can buy this phone?

    • August 11, 2011 at 8:10 am — Reply

      @clive its almost a year since samsung launched this phone in Kenya. I suspect many outlets like FoneXpress must have it too. The prices must also have dropped considerably by now.

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