Guest post by “Samsung plans to open up its homegrown mobile software platform to outside developers and device makers next year in a bid to kick-start growth in the operating system and reduce its reliance on Google Inc.’s Android in the increasingly litigious smartphone and tablet computer business.”
OS’ed Bada?
That would really be awesome, because i love Bada.
Look – Android isnt really open source, and we have to see what Ice Cream Sandwich will be.
Possible a smart move, maybe it will be the same openess as symbian.
Well lets see
I agree.
Speed, stability and battery life are much more of a priority for me. I don’t feel that Android has the same priorities so it would be nice to see how far a nimble smartphone OS can go.
How does bada today compare with android, ios, maemo/meego ? I know rasterman from enlightenment is working for them which implies compiled binary support.
I don’t know much about Bada. I’ve seen a few videos of it and it looks interesting, but I don’t think consumers will be interested in it. My point is that Samsung, a company with as far as I know little to no experience in OS development is going to get global market share when they are going to need to complete against iOS, Android, WP7, RIM, WebOS, Meego, and Symbian?
Most players in the mobile/tablet industry are not software companies. Apple is probably the exception to the rule when it comes to handset makers. A lot of people hate the custom UI’s the handset makers add on top of Android to make their handsets stand out.
I think if another OS is to gain momentum in the handset market it will need co-developed by multiple handset makers, and possibly a company that actually makes decent software. Samsung, HTC, MOTO, and the rest seem to be trying to differentiate their handsets from the rest so I doubt they will ever work together to make an OS.
Meego is still the only OS in my mind that could join the fray, however now that Intel is the company developing for it I have little hope to see it in a handset any time soon. Unless some Chinese company gets it working decently on some ARM chips it seems we will be waiting (not holding our breaths) for Intel to see their mobile SoC reach maturity and get it into consumers hands before we will see Meego.
Bada has more momentum than WP7, MeeGo and WebOS already.
http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/11/bada-beats-windows-phone/
Edited 2011-09-22 05:52 UTC
No, WebOs and Symbian are dead. They have no future. Meego is on life support. Rim is seriously ILL.
Does that mean Bada has a chance, I don’t know but its not as much because of the number of competitors as it is due to the relative dominance of Android and IOS.
MeeGo is like the Amiga, but with freedom. It’s far superior to all the others but its managers are clueless. It will never die though. It will be always be a 0.01% market share OS like slackware or gentoo but GPL software just can not die. If bada is GPL’ed, it will be granted immortality too.
Edited 2011-09-22 21:05 UTC
Once pioneering but now painfully obsolete?
Except that meego is not pioneer. If it had, given it is open source, it would have been used instead of android.
WorldWideWeb the browser (later Nexus, the first browser written by Tim Berners-Lee) is not merely GPL, its source code is actually in the public domain (something which will be granted to every GPL code at some point, it being a copyright license; unless the idea of copyright as a limited in time protection will get completely perverted by then, of course)
And it is utterly dead. Long decomposed. Any “life” awaiting it is as a museum curiosity. Despite the Web, spawned by that browser, being a big thing.
Probably most of the code written is destined to die relatively quickly, GPL / free or not.
As for the Amiga… maybe it was briefly “far superior” (and note, I’m from one of the places where that actually translated to quite massive uptake) – but one can argue that the characteristic which made it superior also severely hindered its progress, were a major reason of its quick downfall.
Almost-Bada is very popular already, consumers being quite interested in phones like Samsung Corby or Star (the latter being until very recently “the fastest 10 million units sold” for Samsung); or, within a broader group, also many versions of LG Cookie. Such inexpensive touchscreen (so called) “feature phones” are very popular in many parts of the world; it’s not unthinkable that those were, in the last few years, the top drivers of touchsreen UI adoption in mobile phones, worldwide.
Various “levels” of Samsung UI, Touchwiz, form a spectrum starting on those feature phones (for example http://www.mobile-review.com/review/samsung-star2-s5260-rev-en.shtm… ), which are already somewhat close to Bada (actually, I’m surprised Samsung doesn’t seem to try pushing onto such phones a fuller Bada more rapidly)
Judging by their uptake (apparently not in you place? Which, you must realize, might be for example very atypical on the world stage), people don’t seem to hate those phones and their “custom” UI at all.
Edited 2011-09-29 00:15 UTC
How free will it be? That is the question. I don’t care if it’s open source or not. Will I be able to compile it, to install it on another phone, to modify it, etc… ?
Probably will be free as in GNU sense.
After all, Samsung knows that real openness will be the sole real advantage of Bada over Android/iOS to attract mind share.
Otherwise it will die a slow death in the low-end market.
From the news it’s not very clear at all, openness might as well refer simply to the OS being open to usage by other manufacturers (mainly LG, with the recent talk about the desire for domestic South Korean mobile OS; possibly also some Chinese / Shanzhai ones)
“Low-end market” (middle segment, really) is where most of the units and most of the money keeping production lines open comes from. Bada also having an advantage of apparently being more snappy on less expensive SoCs.
I have tried developing for Bada and Android. Developing Bada applications is a lot easier than Android (my view). I like Bada’s framework and API a lot more than Android. In my own opinion, it’s more logical and easier to understand. I don’t know what Samsung’s plans are for Bada.
It would be interesting to get an OS overview of Bada. And compare it with Android and Symbian.