At Mobile World Congress 2011 this week, Samsung has expanded its Wave series with Samsung Wave 578. The new Wave 578 will use the latest Bada 2.0 OS, comes with built in Near Field Communication (NFC) chipset for mobile payment supported with the new Bada 2.0.

Samsung this week has announced the winners of “bada Developer Challenge”, an application development contest for the bada platform which took place between May and December in 2010. The bada Developer Challenge attracted 2,077 teams from 54 countries and 34 winning applications have won a total of US $2.7 million. Together with the announcement, Samsung is now offering 31 of 34 winning applications free for this month. So grab all the applications now with your Bada smartphones! Check out the free apps promotion page here.

Samsung announced their new innovation of Wave along the side of Wave 525 and Wave 533. The Samsung Wave 575 aka GT-S5750 will be heading to mid-range section. It has similar features as Wave 525 except in addition the Wave 575 able to runs 3G HSDPA network whereas Wave 525 only capable to runs EDGE.

Announced in Germany this week, Samsung has issued another press release for its upcoming Samsung Wave II GT-S8530, confirmed that the Wave II will be launched in Europe first in November, followed by Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East Asia, Africa, India and China. It will be also loaded with the updated Bada 1.2, which is the same version leaked on Samsung Wave S8500.

Wave is the first Samsung bada-powered handset that successfully sells in Europe, even surpass the new Milestone. The Wave S8500 sold over a million handset in just four months after its release in Europe. The device was targeted for mid-range handset with high-end hardware.

Today, the HDblog’s folks managed to get their hands on the Samsung Wave 723. The handset uses a premium materials and has similar design with the iPhone 4 except on the front of the device has call/end/menu buttons on the bottom. It looks really nice and neat.

While Samsung is building up its Android smartphone army, it is finally expanding its Bada smartphone again with the upcoming Wave 723 (GT-S7320E). Compare to Samsung Wave S8500, the Wave 723 is a lower end smartphone, comes with 3.2-inch WQVGA TFT-LCD display, WiFi (802.11 b/g/n), A-GPS, 5 megapixel camera and support dual band UMTS/HSPA. Wave 723 is also developed based on the bada SDK 1.1. The SDK 1.1 has Auto-UI scaling feature where application developers can reproduce applications to work on Wave 723 from already developed bada Application on Wave with minimum effort.

Announced on the CommunicAsia 2010 show today, two more Bada smartphones will be joining the Samsung Wave 8500 in coming August. Both Samsung Wave 2 S5250 and Wave 2 Pro S5330 share the same feature except the Pro version comes with a slide out QWERTY keyboard. Compare with the first Samsung Wave 8500, the Wave 2 will be even more affordable with a lower specification and support only GPRS/EDGE.

Start to ship out from 1 June next month, Vodafone UK is now accepting Samsung Wave S8500 pre-order through its website. The Bada OS smartphone was first available in Germany earlier this week, and will be available in more countries in June. It offers 1GHz processor, built in bluetooth, WiFi, Super AMOLED 3.3” display and TouchWiz 3.0 for an intuitive and hugely customizable user interface. 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.

Samsung has announced the launch of the Samsung Wave (Model: S8500). It is the first mobile handset to be released on Samsung’s new, open mobile platform, Samsung bada.The Samsung Wave offers 1GHz processor, built in bluetooth, WiFi, Super AMOLED 3.3” display and TouchWiz 3.0 for an intuitive and hugely customizable user interface. 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. The new smartphone will be available globally from April 2010.