Submitted by Samsung has finally lifted the veil a bit on its new mobile platform, Bada. While some of us were expecting a whole new mobile operating system (perhaps built on Linux), reality is a little different: Bada is actually a platform (APIs, programming tools, etc.) which can run on top of different mobile operating systems.
The unveiling of Bada by Samsung still leaves a whole lot of questions unanswered, and I must admit that I’m still not entirely sure what, exactly, it is. As far as I see it now, it’s a set of APIs and developer tools that gives developers an “an easy-to-integrate platform” so they can create “an ocean of endless enjoyment”. It has a strong focus on social networking, and supports user interfaces written in Flash, too – an example of which actually looked pretty impressive.
Bada will initially run on Samsung’s proprietary SHP (Samsung Handset Platform) paired with Samsung’s upcoming TouchWiz 3.0 user interface. It will be entirely multitouch, supporting both resistive and capacitive touch screens. Hardware-wise, it’s chip-agnostic, and Samsung aims for the cheapest Bada handsets to be cheaper than the cheapest Android ones. It won’t run on older phones, however, and the first Bada handset will arrive somewhere in the first half of 2010.
Samsung has a vision of “Smartphone for everyone”, and by offering cheap Bada handsets as well as expensive ones, combined with a focus on in-app purchasing, Samsung hopes to entice developers with greater profits.
Most surprisingly, Samsung has already managed to jump into bed with five serious partners: Twitter, Capcom, EA, Gameloft, and Blockbuster. Capcom showed off a new Resident Evil game running on the Bada platform which actually looked pretty impressive. Blockbuster’s CIO Neil Davis even promised that you could start a BluRay film at home, pause it, and then finish the movie from where you left off on your Bada phone (ding ding ding!), but Samsung’s Younghee Lee wasn’t as optimistic as that.
Bada will obviously have a chance of succeeding, for the simple reason that Samsung is a big player on the mobile market – here in The Netherlands at least, you can’t take two steps without running into someone with a Samsung phone. Time will tell if Bada is actually any good.
Samsung has opened the Bada developers portal, and an SDK with an emulator and code samples should be available soon.
And by the way, Bada in Korean actually means ocean… which is why they are talking about an “ocean of endless enjoyment”.
I just hope they don’t team up with Microsoft for search. I don’t think I could handle Bada Bing.
Maybe they hired the same person who came up with with Asus’ non-sensical “Heart touching” motto (I chuckle every time I read that).
Or maybe they contracted The Firesign Theatre.
“We must come together as one, like a twin! To make life whole, it’s as easy as a bridge over an ocean of endless enjoyment!”
Bada is Swedish for bathe
.
Samsung remind me a lot of U.S. car designers in the late 1950s: change the look regularly and make it glitzy to get the public’s attention so they won’t notice what’s making it work.
I’ve never seen another company that made such nice-looking phones that were let down by the software that made them work.
Bada seems to be just another attempt to go cheap and pile on glitz, instead of doing real work the way that Google has.
“Planned Obsolescence” was Cadillac’s internal code name for the plan. Seriously. But I think they ran out of ideas after Tail Fins, Dice-a-Slice radiator grilles (my name for what the ’59 Eldorado had), and Double-Bullet tail lights.
http://www.1959cadillac.com/images/grill.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Eldorado_59.jpg
http://www.arabaruyasi.com/data/media/8/1959-Cadillac-Eldorado-1024…
Edited 2009-12-09 23:17 UTC
I’d totally drive an El Dorado. As wrong as it is, it’s about as outrageous and f**k-you as they come. Love it.
I grew up with this model:
http://www.vehicleappraisalsbyalan.com/1968 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham.jpg
I still have it. Dad and I repainted and put on a new top a few years ago. But as much as I love it, I don’t drive it much anymore. I drive my beloved 1988 Chevy Sprint:
http://www.seanano.org/vehicles/pastvehicles/turbosprint/images/062…
Neither photo is of the actual car. (But yes, all the colors are right.) Both are pretty close, but not quite as nice as the Google image search photos.
The Sprint is a joy. 22 years old. 340,000 miles. (260,000 driven by me.) 52 mpg real world average. And the original white paint still shines.
Edited 2009-12-09 23:57 UTC
Suzuki makes pretty solid vehicles.
My parents had a 1959 Cadillac and I washed the thing as far up as I could. My mum actually took her driver’s test in it and had to parallel park on a traffic circle in San Jose, CA.
Those were the days when you could pass off a piece of substandard work and someone other than the government would buy it and they couldn’t do anything about it.
I’d think that most people who get a Samsung phone feel that they’ve been cheated by the unfinished software. Really, though, do consumers notice detail work? I suspect that they wouldn’t buy 90 % of the products on the market, if they noticed, or eat at McDonald’s.
I’ll say one good thing about Samsung: they make great components. Their bits and pieces in others’ finished work are great but they should leave products (and especially software) alone.
This is not just Samsung. Hardware-oriented development model is the main design philosophy in the South Korean electronic scene.
Software development overall is quite weak over there.
Why waste time learning this when you get a much bigger market if you develop for iPhone, Android or even Windows Phone.
I really don’t see where Samsung will be going with this. People who buy a smartphone want to be able to buy/download applications. It will take a very long time before Samsung manages to get a Bada store that matches the Apple iPhone application store, or even that of Android Market.
You’re forgetting that Samsung sells WAY more phones than even Apple and Android combined. If they can get their entire portfolio to run Bada, the developers will come on their own, attracted by a HUGE market potential. I mean, look at those five partners they already have with a product that doesn’t even exist yet.
In a world of 6.5 billion people, “a sucker born every minute” becomes somewhat limiting to companies like Apple, Inc.
Well why waste time on Iphone and Android, when Symbian is much larger market.
Currently Samsung has a small appstore with around 600 items (just open in 3 markets), and they sell smartphones with many different OS most with Symbian or Windows but also Android and their own OS. So they already have access to symbian and android developers and the few who develops for windows.
Mostly because the iPhone is the one platform where developers, if they charge for their app, are almost guaranteed to get a sale rather than having someone pirate it. Plus, you’d be surprised how many people at least in the US don’t realize they can install 3rd party software on their Symbian-based smartphones. It’s sad, but there it is.
It’s designed to work with Bing…..right?
How did we not see that coming.
I wonder if Bada will be also installable on current samsung touchscreen phones such as Samsung f480, gt-s5600…
It would be a nice update for these “older” phones.
I’m pretty surprised to be saying this, but looking through the ideas and the developer site this looks pretty compelling. Interesting times are coming.
But it seems like you need to develop in C. Ugh
Well, C++, with a GNU toolchain. That’s not a bad baseline to have though, since it ensures quite a bit of portability from other systems. Part of the problem with Android is that it affords very little in the way of portability, it is fiddly to bring native code over, and Java is only partially portable to dalvik.
Notably, since they use the GNU toolchain you can most likely also use Objective-C++ if you want, giving Bada a very nice path of portability from the iPhone. Porting from Symbian and Windows Mobile shouldn’t be too much trouble either. All API use will have to be hand-ported, but a core of most apps can most likely be brought over, and common compatibility layers are likely to start springing up.
Being reasonably compatible with the platforms which currently have a good app ecosystem is a good idea, I would go so far as to say that the lack of this is the key problem for webOS and BlackBerry, and one of the things holding Android apps back despite the extreme hype the platform has going on.
I just wish samsung would work on making pc studio work in windows 7 64bit or even the wm 6.5 updater to run in windows 7 64bit. they need to make existing stuff work
Because the Windows platform has always been so very neglected by commercial interests.