Samsung has always impressed me as a hardware manufacturer. Their phones are usually decent looking, easy to use and personally I’ve experienced minimal hardware failures. The same holds true for the Samsung Wave, which, if anything, is their most impressive handset to date.

Just unveiled at a Valentine’s Day press conference, the Wave is Samsung’s entrant into the upper tier of the smartphone market. It runs a 1 GHz processor and boasts 802.11n, an 800 x 480 AMOLED, Bluetooth 3.0, a 5MP camera, 2GB or 8GB internal storage with a microSD slot for expansion, and codec support for WMV, DivX, XviD, MP3 and 720p decoding and recording. The spec sheet is incredible, until you get to one little detail.

Bada. Samsung dropped its brand-new OS on this phone – yes, it’s the operating system that’s meant to make feature phones all fun and featurey. I tried to be understanding when Samsung launched Bada, but with a phone this fantastic there is no reason to run anything but Android.

The phone launches in April. Prices remain unannounced.

Today Samsung announced that it was entering the open mobile operating system business with a service called “bada.” It’s still unclear as to the plan for the system, but we at least know that it’s not for smartphones. Yes, Samsung has designed a feature phone OS with its own SDK to lure in developers. And by “lure” I mean attract so few developers that the plan is scrapped for a stripped-down version of Android in the next year or two.

There are precious few details about the operating system. The press release tells us that the word bada means “ocean” in Korean, which “was chosen to convey the limitless variety of potential applications which can be created using the new platform.” Awww, your optimism is so adorable, Samsung. Really, that’s about all we know. The rest is coming in December, which is when Samsung will release the SDK. Wait – an SDK release just a month after the OS is announced? Are you watching this, Palm? Hmm?