Samsung has launched its new ‘Wave’ smartphone – the first to run its new proprietary mobile operating system, bada – in Europe today. The device (pictured) will launch initially in the UK, France and Germany with Vodafone announced as the UK distributor. Further launches are set to follow in Southeast Asia, China, the Middle East and Africa, and Latin America. First unveiled at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in February, Wave boasts a Super AMOLED touchscreen and a 1GHz processor. “This launch will make our platform vision a reality and consumers, developers and operators will experience the freedom of choice that bada enables,” commented JK Shin, the president of Samsung’s mobile unit.  Launching simultaneously with Wave will be a software portal called Samsung Apps, which is set to become available in 80 countries around the world offering users access to premium content and applications. Samsung also announced that the first version of the bada software developer kit (1.0.0) was soon to emerge from beta mode. In the UK, the Wave smartphone will be available from Vodafone for free on a £25 per month two-year contract. Customers signing up to the tariff will get 300 free minutes of calls, unlimited texts, and a 500MB data allowance each month.

Last month, Samsung said that smartphones based on bada would amount to one-third of its total smartphone offerings this year. However, analysts believe the vendor will have a tough time attracting developers to a proprietary platform in the face of huge competition from open-source rivals Android and Symbian, as well as established ‘closed-shops’ such as Apple’s iPhone OS. Although it is the world’s number two mobile phone vendor with around 20 percent market share, Samsung has struggled in the high-end smartphone space and is attempting to treble its smartphone shipments in 2010 (to around 18 million) by expanding its portfolio.