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.

Rolling out world wide for Wave S8500 users, official Samsung Bada’s twitter account has “announced” an upcoming major OS upgrade with Bada version 1.2. The firmware upgrade will be first released to SIM-free Wave users in Europe, follow by the rest of the world. It did not mention a detail schedule though, expect to see the complete roll out finish by end of Q1 next year.

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.

Official Bada 1.2 firmware soon to be released on Samsung Wave S8500? A leaked firmware update was just popped out on SamsungFirmwareWorld, the software update has Bada 1.2 inside with a version of S8500XXJID.

Samsung has just unveiled their newest creation on the Wave handset. They already have the Wave 2 (Wave 525) but this is Wave II (S8530). The device is the successor of the original Wave. The Wave II has adopted a large screen to replace the previous Wave; it’s a 3.7-inch one (800×480) along with a Super clear LCD (it’s probably the same as Super TFT).

Samsung planning to release their Wave 723 to China. Samsung Wave 723 predicted heads to China Unicom. The handset will support SDK 1.1.

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.