Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
...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.
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).
Then get a Droid :-)
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
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?
(...)