Smart phones are designed to do many things. From expected features such as allowing users to make and receive calls and messages to having memory storage space for contact information and for the inbox of messages. With the arrival of better hardware, mobile phones begun to do more. From being able to connect to email servers to playing media content, the average mobile phone today has plenty of basic capabilities.

The arrival of smart phone technology, and more importantly, the new, complex mobile platforms that have been introduced, the capabilities of the smart phone has exponentially increased in the past few years.

While manufacturers and phone developers have been able to do plenty of things for the technology and the community, there are still plenty of functions that the average smart phone can provide. Thanks to the high power processors, large capacity batteries, massive touch screens and other hardware available, a standard smart phone of today is pretty much a very small, low power computer.

However, making use of this hardware is not something that phone makers can focus on. It is up to independent developers and companies to create specialized software for phones –and that is why we have apps.

But why apps are so famous and widespread is a different matter.

Sure, a mobile phone can do plenty of things, but Google and HTC has better things to do than program a augmented reality golfing guide –and that is where the apps come in for the end users. By allowing developers to create and distribute apps for different smart phones, users are able to access a wide variety of content and install specifically what they need.

From simple RSS readers to fun interactive games to very complex information databases, apps can store and provide a vast variety of data and functions. While there are a wide range of apps available for most platforms, they certainly shouldn’t be ignored when it comes to purchasing a new phone. Whether or not it has that must-have-app may prove the deciding factor between, say, that new Samsung Wave 2, or the Apple iPhone 4.

It may be a bit of a surprise for some people, but the Samsung Wave 2 and the Wave 2 Pro smart phones are officially confirmed to be mid to low range handsets. With the original Samsung Wave being a pretty impressive high end smart phone, it was originally thought that the next device in the series would have bigger touch screen display, a faster processor and overall, better features. Instead, the Wave 2 and Wave Pro 2 are more of watered down versions of the original device.

This is easily explained by the fact that Samsung aims to put the Bada OS into the mid range smart phone market as opposed to competing with the big giants of the high end market (which would be the Android, Windows Phone 7 and the Apple iPhone). The original goal from Samsung was that they wanted to bring smart phone technology to everyone.

And by turning the Bada into the best mobile platform for this range of handsets, Samsung has a chance to gain a good hold of the market (they would still have to compete with the Android as the Google OS is being used in low to high end smart phones).

In detail, the S5250 Wave 2 and S5330 Wave 2 smart phones are pretty identical in terms of specs; the only difference is that the Wave 2 Pro has a physical QWERTY keyboard. The devices come with a pretty decent sized screen at 3.2 inches with a resolution of 240 x 400 pixels. With an internal memory of 80MB, users are better off using a 16GB micro SD card for storing data and other content. Of course, the phones will be using the Bada operating system, so expect to get plenty of good app support and a good choice of games for the platform.