Samsung goes bada

NOT CONTENT WITH Android, Symbian and the Iphone, Samsung has decided that it needs to introduce a new smartphone platform to the mobile market.

Originally unveiled a few weeks ago, "bada" was officially launched by Samsung today, with some details provided about the hardware, interface, development environment and partners, although the first phones won't be available until the middle of next year.

Bada means "ocean" in Korean and is pronounced ba-da.

According to Samsung, today's smartphones are only for geeks and the business elite but it's hoping that bada will help convince the masses to ditch their feature phones and opt for smartphones instead.

Bada's interface is essentially version of Samsung's touchwiz interface, and will feature flash support and motion sensing through accelerometers, proximity and activity sensors. It'll also have nifty things like fine-tuned vibration control and face detection.

In a bid to get programmers to flock to develop for its app store, Samsung has launched the Samsung bada Developer Challenge with a first prize for $300,000 and a total prize pool of $2.7 million.

Details about the development environment are a little unclear, but we know that Flash and C++ developers are sorted. Samsung will also be running a series of Developer Days over the course of next year, initially in Seoul, London and San Francisco, with more events following as the year progresses.

According to Samsung it avoided opting for existing operating systems like Android or Symbian, saying they are too complicated, expensive and geographically limited, so instead it has decided to simplify matters by adding another player into the market for punters to consider.

Fortunately Samsung reckons that bada is simple, cheap, integrates everything flawlessly and will have apps for every conceivable use by day one - so that's alright then.

At the launch event Samsung also rolled out five of its partners, namely Twitter, Capcom, EA, Gameloft and Blockbuster. The game heavy line up prompted a few questions about bada's focus, but Samsung insisted that while games and entertainment would certainly be a part of bada, there would be plenty of other applications and services.

We were secretly hoping Microsoft's search team would be included in this lineup, if only so we could make a 'bada-bing' pun.

Samsung intends to release its first bada phone in the first half of next year, which will be a high end model, with more devices tipping up in the second half of 2010.

We've got some footage from the launch event that we'll put up shortly. µ