To all those Samsung enthusiasts living in Europe: this one’s for you.

Samsung today announced that the Bada-powered Wave is now available in the UK and France (it has been available in Germany for about a week).

UK Vodafone fans can grab the phone for free on a £25 per month plan, but no outright prices have yet been announced for the UK or France. However, eager Germans can pick it up for €429.

In case you don’t know, the Wave is powered by a 1Ghz CPU, has a 3.3″ 480×800 AMOLED screen, 5MP autofocus camera with LED flash, and can record 720p Video. It also has GPS, WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, and a mysterious OS.

Current rumours say that it will make its way to North America in June, but not with who, or for how much.

But in the mean time, you can grab a Beta SDK to start developing for the new OS. Just don’t expect to get rich from it, mmmkay?

[via The Unwired View]

Well, that was one wild journey. After a dozen or so false starts and a seemingly endless gaggle of leaked memos making promises that couldn’t be kept, Android 2.1 is now officially (really!) available for the Sprint Samsung Moment. Still no word on the update for the Sprint Hero. You hear that sound? Thats the sound of a million Hero owners collectively grinding their teeth.

The good news for Moment owners doesn’t come without caveats, though.

It’s not an over-the-air update, so there’s a bit of manual labor involved. Additionally, this update will wipe everything you’ve got on your device. Before partaking, make sure to back up all your apps, ringtones, pictures of your cats in people clothing, and any other crucial goodies you might have laying around. Text messages can’t be backed up, and aren’t synced to the cloud — so if you’ve got a text you like to turn to when the nights get cold and lonely, make sure to forward it to email or something.

Ready to dive in? You can find the update software here.

And so it begins: Samsung has just released the first build of the SDK for Bada, their built-in-house Smartphone platform. The SDK comes complete with it’s own user interface creation tool, debugger, simulator, and API set. Alas, it’s currently Windows-only.

Developers are one of the most key ingredients to whether or not a platform succeeds. Developers flocked to the iPhone, and seem to finally be warming up to Android. Just about every other platform, however, seems to be having a hard time pulling developers into their camp. Will devs embrace Bada?

Probably not – at least not for the time being. While Samsung has plans to launch a number of Bada phones around the world, they’ve yet to formally announce plans for any outside of the Wave — and they haven’t even confirmed the Wave is coming to the US.

Apple brought a massive market all using one device, with an SDK born out of a foundation (Cocoa) that has been in the works for decades. Google’s Android offers up a constantly expanding armory of handsets that carriers are willing to dump massive ad budgets into as their answer to the iPhone. If Samsung wants to garner the interest of developers, they’re going to have to figure out (and proudly proclaim) what they bring to the table.

[Via Phonescoop]