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.