14 DAY TRIAL // Not even launched on the market yet, Samsung's S8500 Wave smartphone running the new Bada operating system has already received some "reinforcements." Leaked during a MobileMonday event, where the company held a Bada Developer Day to showcase its latest software platform, one of the slides presented at the meeting contains information about four new smartphones that are supposedly cheaper than the S8500 Wave, which seems to be netted to about 350 Euros in Europe, as the lowest price for now, but it could go up to 430 Euros.
Even if only briefed, the mention of these four new handsets has been leaked on purpose by Samsung most likely, which intends to extend its application database for the new Bada operating system. Having more devices that run this OS is probably the best way to take over some of the market that has been shared with Symbian, Android, and MacOS.
Information related to the leaked smartphones is scarce and only includes few words about each of the four. Besides their prices, which range between 10k rubles and 20k rubles (255 Euros - 500 Euros), there's no detailed info about any of the devices. We only know that two of the phones will carry full QWERTY keyboards, while the other two will most likely have a bar form factor.
While I'm not hoping for the same Super AMOLED touchscreens, I think the most expensive will probably boast one. The leaked smartphones will probably miss some of S8500's features, while others, the most expensive ones, will have improved features to offer.
Besides planning to expand its new Bada operating system to 75 countries, 156 operators and offer more than 6,500 applications, Samsung intends to directly take over Nokia's marketshare by the end of the year, even though it's only by 2%. These are bold estimations, as I'm pretty sure Nokia will probably come out with something new during this year to overcome the possibly low sales due to the financial crisis.
