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Samsung Enters Smartphone Wars With Bada OS
MojoKid writes "Samsung is betting there's room for more in the smartphone market and has unveiled its new bada OS. The name 'bada,' means 'ocean' in Korean and was chosen to convey the 'limitless variety of potential applications which can be created using the new platform.' Samsung claims the OS is extremely simple for developers, saying that bada was built to be extremely interactive with its users — including flash control, motion sensing, fine-tuned vibration control and face detection. Samsung is hoping developers will take this user interface and create a variety of applications focused around it, and thus provide different types of apps than exist for the iPhone and Android OS. The bada OS has a variety of sensors, including accelerometers, tilt, weather, proximity and activity. Samsung will be hosting a series of Developer Days in Seoul, London and San Francisco, among other cities, throughout 2010."
BadOS? Was Windows Mobile rebranded?
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
To go with their new, incompatible OS, maybe they can introduce yet another new, incompatible power plug and a new, incompatible headphone jack!
We figured out in the 1990s that writing your own OS every couple of years doesn't scale. You just end up isolating your developers from the rest of the industry.
I've written a few worthless OSes myself. One of them actually gets used still. But I wrote it out of desperation, not as a business model.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
obligatory Fifth Element quote
very likely to come with Bada Bing.
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
It's easy and simple to accomplish!
Thats one Badassos
I don't care what the "Whiz Bang" features are if I can't easily create an application with my existing tools with a language I already know, I am not interested. I barely have enough time keeping up with developments now. This may have worked if they came out 18 months ago, or even if they came out before the Veriizon/Android deal. With Windows Mobile, Palm Pre, Blackberry, iPhone, and Android, I don't see where this fits. Maybe it will sell in Asia. What US phone company is going to put their marketing dollars behind this? Sprint?
"Ones and zeros were everywhere. I even think I saw a two!" - Bender
Wouldn't it be better to have a limitless variety of actual applications?
that's a really badaos
...as it doesn't specify a single kernel. [source] It's more of a unified platform for development on Samsung phones.
It also probably uses EFL, as Samsung was recently shown to sponsor the development of Enlightenment and its supporting libraries [source]
With Nokia moving to a unified development environment across most of their devices, it's really not a surprising move for the #2 mobile phone manufacturer in the world.
Now, please explain how an OS can possess sensors?
I'll be sure to tell my i760 that.
Based on goatseOS, lets you get your dots on all your slashes. Coming to the trollphone and dogballs netbook in 2016.
I think some people are misunderstanding diversity. For a consumer device like a mobile phone, having multiple versions in the market is held to stimulate demand. It makes sense for manufacturers to optimise their kernels and support for the devices they want to use, then offer a consistent developer interface. It also makes sense for developers - large manufacturers like Samsung want to have a "community" of developers, not people who produce a product that works with the competition as well. It is then worth investing support effort in those developers, because they are not giving it away to the competition.
As I say, we'll see in a year how this pans out. Meanwhile, 4 multitasking relatively open platforms versus a pretty and slick but less capable one. 2010 looks interesting.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Indeed - Samsung are the 2nd largest phone company in terms of market share (second only to Nokia), and they have plenty of "smart"phones (especially if you use a definition broad enough to include the Iphone - that would include most phones).
Of course, perhaps to Slashdot and the media they've "entered", because they seem to have some distorted idea that the mobile phone market consists of Apple in the lead, with the only competition being from Blackberry and Android. The reality is nothing of the sort. (E.g., this random page I found gives Nokia at 35%, Samsung 2nd at 31%, basically a whole load of companies who virtually never get Slashdot coverage - and Apple, who get Daily Iphone Slashvertisements, at 4% - and that's one of the higher estimates I've seen for Apple.)
Presumably what the article meant to say is that they've entered the smartphone OS wars, in that I believe that previously they'd used off the shelf OSs like Windows Mobile and Android? Comparing to the Iphone or the Droid doesn't make sense, since this is a new OS, it should be compared to OSs such as Symbian and Android (and if they were going to compare to products rather than OS, please, at least pick some of the major sellers rather than ones with small market share).
But does it run Linux!?
http://www.bada.com/a-glimpse-at-samsung-bada/
"The kernel layer, which can be based on a real-time OS or Linux kernel, depending on hardware configuration"
That's a definite 'maybe'.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Yup, indeed. One more Linux distribution for Smartphones.
Look like the explosion of Linux Distros that we saw slready is happening all over again on the smartphones.
Well, if history has taught us anything, we already know how it will end :
the majority of them will either collapse or get restricted into some special niche.
only a few of the old timer will stay (probably Android among them ?)
On the upside, that's one more Linux-kernel-based system being sold out there. Just showing that it's a perfectly viable solution.
And perhaps, after a while, as you suggest, constructors will start to realise as you said that each one rolling it's own telephony-stack and -userspace is a waster of ressource, and perhaps will see some coordinated effort going on for core telephony components.
(Just as currently lots of core component of modern distributions are developed in a centralised fashion. DBus comes as an example).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Well, in my native language "Ba, da!" had a very clear, affirmative, reinforcing, meaning. Loosely, it translates into "wrong, it's yes!" to make the point that the answer is "yes" rather than "no".
So I can say "Ba, nu!" which emphasizes that the answer is "no" rather than "yes".
Samsung is betting there's room for more in the smartphone market...
I may not be a high priced marketing exec or whatnot but I would take that bet. In fact, I'd happily wager that the smartphone market reached its limit a while ago... But, hey, good luck there Samsung.
In A.D. 2009
Smartphone war was beginning.
Steve Jobs: What happen?
Steve's assistant: Somebody set up us the Samsung Bada.
Apple technician: We get UMTS signal.
Steve Jobs: What?
(...)
From the website navigation menu: bada for business | bada for developers.
Bada for Samsung, more like.
Amnesty International
Can you find it on Bing?
The potential of this didn't escape me though. Motion sensor, accelerometer,face detection, doubtless GPS so while we can use this as a personal theremin ,Big Brother or malware can now not only tell where we are, but what we're doing and recognize the face of the one we're doing it to.
O.k. ,o.k. , it's pretty out there but I haven't had coffee and yours hasn't taken hold yet.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
..to implement their search functionality directly into the OS. (wait for it) It will be called -
BadaBing.
Thank you! I'll be here all week! Try the veal!
-= This is a self-referential sig =-
"The name 'bada,' means 'ocean' in Korean and was chosen to convey the 'limitless variety of potential applications which can be created using the new platform.'"
That statement is almost as meaningless as this post. Personally, I prefer actual applications to 'potential applications'. Of course, would you release a new phone OS with a name that conveyed a limited variety of potential applications? To heck with actual applications.
Deliver us from marketers. What drivel.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The BADa OS? Is this like when a Western company releases a product in the mysterious East or that there Southern Hemisphere place, and it turns out their made up product name translates to "rat feces" or "your mother is a whore" or something?
bada*s phone! :P
I wish I'd known about this a few months ago.
I bought an Android-based Samsung Galaxy which is great hardware-wise (standard connectors, 8GB flash built-in and still the best-looking Android phone out there, in my opinion), but looks to be basically abandoned software-wise.
Just this week Samsung pushed another small update for the same Android 1.5 which came with the system at a time when Android 2.1 devices are already available from other vendors. There have been rumours that Samsung has no intentions of upgrading the system software to even 1.6, and they're not communicating anything to the community.
This sucks since more and more apps are coming out requiring at least 1.6, such as the google maps navigation and google goggles.
Hell, at least they could allow changes to the baseband so that the community could build their own system. It kind of defeats the whole purpose of having an open-source OS when you can't use the radio because it's locked down.
In fact, unlike other Android phones, you need Samsung's crappy, bloated, windows-only software just to upgrade the system's firmware. The other get automatic over-the-air updates.
My advice to anyone considering an Android phone is to go with HTC (they're still supporting the G1) or Motorola (they have their future riding on Android). Samsung isn't getting my money again.
Bada bing, bada boom!
So use google, or else.
We can say "Bada bing, bada bang, bada *boom*"
With real software companies (Apple,Microsoft) pouring ever greater and greater amounts of resources into the mobile market the time for hardware vendors to be writing their own OS has come and gone from the perspective of the high-end smartphone market.
Its likely to be great for Samsung when selling phones to people who just want to talk and sms but for everyone else its all about applications.
In the short term they may be able to get away with it.. Heck taking the andriod route of cobbling linux, webkit, windowing, java together works in the short term. As competition ramps up the future demands more than pedestrian effort (designing pretty UIs) that most vendors would be capable of given the economies of scale and room any single hardware vendor has to operate. At some point its cheaper to pay licensing fees to a third party or use something free (Andriod).
This trend of supplying every person with a programmable device packed full of sensors could very well be the beginnings of mainstream robotics. I mean sure, an iphone or samsung that sports bada may not look like Asimo, but it's certainly gaining the environmental sensing capabilities. Imagine one day driving up to a restaurant, docking your phone, and having it valet your car. Dock into your lawn mower and have it cut your grass... Plug it into a multi-purpose robotic platform and have it make you tea. With the sensing and computational power that's increasing in sophistication, we are watching robot brains grow in our pants pockets.
-- A cat is no trade for integrity!
I'm all for competition, but when so many competitors start to cross the line of market saturation it really just sets us back to where we started.
I mean, I like the idea of having the iPhones and Androids and Palm Pre's duking it out for domination of the mobile phone market but when you have dozens of other types of phone OS's all trying to get in on the action then suddenly we're back to where we started. Hundreds of phones and no real consistency between them.
And before Slashdotters inevitably decide that it's necessary to coldly argue or otherwise patronize me for this post, please bear in mind that it's my own opinion, resultant of my own experience.
/* No Comment */
...it's an API specification for loadable applications on top of some arbitrary operating system. You can find the documentation here (although I don't know whether you need to log in to see the API docs).
It's all in C++, and isn't bad, actually, with a rich class library and a UI that actually works. Right now it's all still in prototype, with an Eclipse-and-gcc-based IDE that builds Intel binaries and runs them on a simulator. To build for the device you need a copy of ARM's RealView compiler (at about 20,000 UKP a head), but I hear rumours that they're going to provide a gcc-based approach. It's all ARM binary based so if you don't have an ARM phone you're out of luck.
As for the operating system --- so far it appears to be based on a Samsung proprietary OS called SHP, but as it's just an API spec, I can easily imagine bada systems on other operating systems.
And yes, it's all DRMd up the wazoo. Apps have to be signed, by them, before they can be installed.
Bada Boom!
Hey guys, get your pitchforks and torches! I think I found the guy who wrote Windows!
Is it really the guy who wrote Windows? Maybe it's the guy who wrote Microsoft Bo-Wait...
If the OS is shaky enough, accelerometers actually make some sense. And *tilt* looks so much more user-friendly than a blue screen of death.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
This is only barely related to this article, but hey... this is Slashdot.
Reading the word Ocean it struck me odd that it's two syllables. Generally, the older and more basic the concept, the shorter the word. But then I recalled that "sea" was another name for ocean, which is about as basic as sounds can be for something.
Then something struck me about that word: the sounds kind of sound like it describes, wind and waves splashing. Could the word 'sea' actually be an onomatopoeia? The dictionary doesn't really help me out on the question, but it seems like it could be.
Anyway, I know return you to your regularly scheduled article on cell phones. :)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Nokia and Symbian Foundation promises a simple thing with a real life example already in hand. Learn Qt to write for 200M+ devices regardless of Linux/Symbian and even Windows Mobile.
It is not Java. It is C++ with a perfect real life example in hand, KDE 4. Same source, 3 platforms (Linux/BSD, Windows, OS X).
I know slashdot community knows the deal once Nokia acquired Trolltech but anyway, trying to wake up developers. Also no reason for Qt not to appear on iPhone OS X while .NET exists in some form and apps approved.
PS: Obviously you will need to know more than Qt for "deep level running" apps such as Nimbuzz, Birdstep Smartconnect etc. I speak about regular apps, the 99% of much bragged about 100.000 "app store" stuff.
I am not a financial analyst or a cell phone market analyst so, Samsung has to do more to impress me and get credible in my eyes.
All I see is a company who makes hell of money from cheap electronics, phones and tries to get itself respected with funnily named operating systems which shows nothing unique to begin with.
Nokia says their Symbian kernel is so good that it can run on lowest kind of specs and does magical things like doing the comms and smart phone stuff on single CPU. So, they have a point to keep up with Symbian foundation like moving the entire S40 line (hundred million/year!) to S60. They also have Linux in hand (Maemo) which the absolutely high end phones/devices will ship with, a standard platform with Maemo/Qt. At least re-coding the UI won't be necessary. I wouldn't blame them if they shipped 2-3 Windows Mobile devices since companies who runs Windows server wants to have Windows Mobile handsets. No matter how great your 3rd party Exchange support is, they still go and buy a HTC/Asus running Windows Mobile. That (with imaginary windows) makes total 3 operating systems (kernels) each with a good explanation. If they can really manage to make Qt something like "just code the app, let us care what kernel it runs on", the OS will be irrelevant anyway.
What kind of unique offering does Samsung's new (!) OS provide? What kind of example can Samsung provide in terms of developer support? How can Samsung explain making one of the best hardware platform Symbian S60 V5 runs on (Omnia HD) and yet not managing to convince a single developer to code for it?
Samsung owners have flamed mobile sites and especially Symbian sites for not even mentioning their products. How can you mention/support a brand which changes OS plans every 3 months? At least Nokia and recently Motorola has some sort of roadmap you can rely on.
Good luck finding a single developer who will spare time to learn (!) their OS. Perhaps they will bribe a couple of companies to release products but that is all.
Samsung should stick with their impossible to use cheap phones and leave the "smart" business to companies with serious management and developer support. I hate to see people wasting money and time to their empty promises. As they are the second most popular cell phone maker, software industry is a bit afraid of them so they can't speak openly. It doesn't need to be a smart phone guru to see their treatment to developers though.
Did they become founding member of Open Handset Alliance too?!?
They are also founding member of Symbian Foundation while they did impossible to recover damage to foundation by announcing they won't release any Symbian phone in 2010! They absolutely acted like a trojan hurting Symbian owners at the end.
http://www.symbian.org/members/member-directory
I think both foundations doesn't need them and they should give them a very public boot. It is not like they will produce anything serious with such corporate culture anyway.
There is a mysterious trend that having Linux on a device automatically grants you thousands of applications.
I see the same thing on Symbian land too. These people, including the suits making these decisions have no clue about the Linux. Of course, there is a huge and healthy application scene on Linux but we don't speak about desktop here. If the large software library of desktop instantly translated to mobile, Windows Mobile would have million apps now.
I don't even bother about commercial third party apps. For example will Microsoft release a full feature Live Messenger on a Linux powered device? Will Adobe spare time&money to Flash on that OS while their hands are already full? What about .NET? Trolltech (Nokia) Qt? J2ME?
I think these company execs thinks iPhone OS X is a "new" OS.
iPhone OS X is in fact; 40 years old Unix, 20-25 year old NeXT running Mach Kernel along with a big collection of open source software which aren't really "newly invented". That is the most amazing part of iPhone success which everyone seems to miss. The most trendy, innovative device runs on a very conservative OS.
That is one of the worst web sites for signing up. It seems that you have to be a Samsung developer and then you get to reenter all the same information to become a bada developer? I finally get everything filled out and submit. I get a 404 error. Will the web developer who created that abomination please stand up and be recognized so that we can laugh at your skills?