A closer look at the Samsung Bada Mobile OS

If you’re not familiar with Samsung’s new Bada O, you are not alone. We first heard about Samsung’s new mobile OS about a month ago when the company announced that they would be phasing out Windows mobile and Symbian handsets over the next few year and focusing more on Android and their own new Bada platform. The chart which was presented indicated that Bada would be running on nearly 50% on all Samsung Smartphone’s by 2012. So the question remains… what is Bada? From what we can tell, Bada will be Samsung’s Smartphone platform of choice which will offer an immersive user experience, application market, and full flash support all covered up in the upcoming TouchWiz 3.0 UI. Essentially, it appears that Samsung is simply naming their current proprietary OS which they use on many of their TouchWiz handsets and opening the platform up for application developers.

On December 8th, Samsung showed off Bada’s functionality for the first time at an event in London. Samsung gave a few video demonstrations of what application, games, and UI, but failed to produce any actual hardware that was running on bada OS. The first phone to launch with Bada is not expected until the first half of 2010.

Overall, the Samsung Bada OS looks to be a promising platform which delivers enough power for 3D games and great social connectivity. We will have to wait a few months to get any real sense of how the app development process will work and know if developers are really interested in creating apps for yet another proprietary mobile OS.