Samsung have unveiled their first smartphone which features their Bada platform, the Samsung Wave Mobile Phone, at an event yesterday, just preceding the Mobile World Congress, which kicks-off today at Barcelona. The Samsung Wave phone, also called the Samsung S8500 phone, is definitely a treat to the eye, with its slim, 0.42-inches thick candybar structure.

Being the first Bada handset, the Wave brings with it waves of anticipation. The open source platform has an application store and Samsung have already opened the gates for developers to create their apps for it.

A 3.3" AMOLED touch display covers majority of the space on the front of the phone. A high resolution of 800 x 480 pixels is sported on this TouchWiz 3.0 UI screen. The home screen can be customised depending on the user's priorities.

This new Samsung Bada phone also offers quick access to social networks and apps from the home page. It supports WiFi for internet connectivity along with the Samsung Dolfin browser. Plus there is 3G support too, apart from the quad GSM bands. The Social Hub feature of the Samsung Wave mobile phone gives a common interface for accessing emails, messages and calender events. Even MMS is supported.

At its heart, the Samsung Wave S8500 mobile phone has a 1GHz processor running. There's entertainment packed within this mobile handset too, with a media player and a 3.5mm headphone socket. A 5MP camera with LED flash is as well present. There's A-GPS built in too.

One more special feature of Samsung's first Bada phone is that it is also the first among Samsung mobile phones to feature Bluetooth 3.0. This new Bluetooth version allows faster wireless data transfers between devices. Even microSD cards of up to 32GB are supported for memory expansion and data exchange.

The Samsung Wave mobile phone price is not announced yet. It is expected to release some time in April. There's no official word which markets exactly it would step into.

Updates - This handset is said to be available with O2, Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile networks in the UK.