Samsung just announced that Wave 723 – the fourth phone that will carry its own open mobile OS bada – will be available first in Germany starting next month. After the pilot Samsung Wave, the company did two low-end handsets with the bada OS – the Wave 2, and the Wave 2 Pro with a QWERTY keyboard. Both phones carried a 3.2″ LCD screen, and a 3MP camera.

The new Wave 723 steps things up from those with an LCD screen of the same 3.2″ size, but a back cover made of metal, Wi-Fi, and a 5MP camera with LED flash. An interesting design take is the screen cover which is made of leather, and is attached to the bottom of the phone. We’ll leave you to decide how comfortable this one will be, but the phone is fairly thin – just 0.46 ” (11.8mm) – and we guess that’s without the flap.

On the software side, the Wave 723 will be sporting Samsung’s Social Hub SNS integration with Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. Apart from that, the phone will be able to access Samsung Apps, featuring “a wealth of games, navigation, social networking, e-book, health and lifestyle applications”. The Wave 723 is developed on the bada SDK 1.1, which supports the Auto-UI scaling feature – in other words, applications for the original Wave can be easily ported to the Wave 723 as well.

After the German launch, the Samsung Wave 723 (aka GT-S7230E) is heading to the rest of Europe, as well as Southeast Asia, Middle East and Africa. According to the WSJ, the phone is not coming to the US, as the carriers are not willing to deal with another smartphone OS, and will sell for around 240 EUR ($306).
source: Samsung & WSJ

Samsung announced 83% net profit rise year-on-year in the second quarter to $3.6bln. Demand was strong across the board, with a whopping sevenfold sales increase in its core semiconductors business. TV and panels sales also rose significantly, and the company announced it should be able to keep up with the demand for LCD and LED panels in Q3.

It didn’t mention anything about the Super AMOLED demand, though, maybe because it hopes to sell 10mln units of both the Galaxy S and the Samsung Wave phones in this current quarter. Nothing wrong with wanting to keep your major advantage to yourself, especially considering that the average selling price of Samsung’s handsets fell in Q2 because of the competition, despite the nearly 64mln handsets being pushed out.

The company is the world’s second largest cell phone producer, but, similarly to the largest one, Nokia, most of the business comes from basic handsets – only 30% of the company’s phones sold in Q2 were touchscreen, for example.
source: SamsungHub