PHONE ARENA

Bada

Company / developer	Samsung Electronics
Programmed in	C++
Working state	Ready for public downloads
Latest stable release	1.2.0[citation needed] / December 07, 2010
Supported platforms	ARM
Kernel type	proprietary or Linux
Official website	www.Bada.com

Bada (pronounced /ˈbɑːdɑː/) is a mobile operating system being developed by Samsung Electronics.
It is designed to cover both high-end smartphones and lower-end feature phones. Samsung claims that Bada will rapidly replace its proprietary feature phone platform, converting feature phones to smartphones.^[1] The name 'Bada' is derived from 바다, the Korean word for ocean or sea.

History

Samsung announced the Bada platform on 10 November 2009.^[2][3] After the launch, companies such as Twitter, EA, Capcom, Gameloft, and Blockbuster showed their support for the Bada platform.^[4] After the announcement, the Wave S8500 was first shown at Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona (Catalonia-Spain) in Feb 2010. At that time tens of applications running on the first Bada phone were demonstrated such as Asphalt 5 by Gameloft.^[5]
In May 2010 Samsung released a beta of their Software development kit (SDK) for Bada to attract developers. In addition, Samsung started the Bada Developer Challenge with a total prize of $2,700,000 (USD). In August 2010 Samsung released version 1.0 of the SDK.
The first Bada-based phone was the Samsung Wave S8500, released on June 1, 2010,^[6][7] which sold one million handsets in its first 4 weeks on the market.^[8]

Versions

The Samsung S8500 Wave was launched with version 1.0 of the Bada operating system. Soon after the launch, Samsung released version 1.0.2 with minor fixes for European users. It will be available for the rest of the world in the near future.^[9] The latest version 1.2 was released with the Samsung S8530 Wave II phone.^[10]

Samsung Apps

With the release of the Samsung Wave, Samsung opened an international application store, Samsung Apps, for the Bada platform.^[11]
In July 2010, Samsung Apps had 300 applications to offer, 70% of them being free. Samsung expected to have 7000 applications in its application store by the end of 2010. However Samsung did not meet this target as there were only 4570 applications in Samsung Apps store as of 1st January.^[12]

Architecture

Bada, as Samsung defines it, is not an operating system itself, but a platform with a kernel configurable architecture, which allows the use of either a proprietary real-time operating system (RTOS) kernel, or the Linux kernel.^[1] According to copyrights displayed by Samsung Wave S8500, it uses code from FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, although other phones might use Linux instead.
On top of the kernel, there are Device, Service, and Framework Layers respectively. The Device Layer provides core functions such as graphics, protocols, telephony, security, etc. The Service Layer provides more service-centric features such as SNS, mapping, in-app-purchasing, and so on. To provide such features there is a so-called Bada Server. The top layer, the Framework Layer, provides an Application Programming Interface in C++ for application developers to use.
Bada provides various UI controls to developers: It provides assorted basic UI controls such as Listbox, Color Picker, Tab, etc. In addition, it has a web browser control based on the open-source WebKit, and also features Adobe Flash, supporting Flash 9. Both WebKit and Flash can be embedded inside native Bada applications. Bada offers interactive mapping with Point of interest (POI) features, which can also be embedded inside native applications.^[13] It supports pinch-to-zoom, tabbed browsing, and cut, copy, and paste.^[14]
Bada supports various mechanisms to enhance interaction: various sensors, such as motion sensing, vibration control, face detection, accelerometer, magnetometer, tilt, and GPS, which can be incorporated into applications ^[1]. Multipoint-touch is also supported.
Native applications are developed in C++ with the Bada SDK, and the Eclipse based IDE. GNU based tool chains are used for building and debugging applications. The IDE also contains UI Builder, with which developers can easily design the interface of their applications by dragging and dropping UI controls into forms. For testing and debugging, the IDE contains a simulator which can run apps.

Devices

Samsung's first phone running the Bada platform was shown at the Mobile World Congress 2010: the Wave S8500. The Wave is a slim touchscreen phone powered by Samsung's "Hummingbird" CPU (S5PC110), which includes a 1 GHz ARM Cortex-8 CPU and a built-in PowerVR SGX 3D graphics engine, "Super AMOLED" screen and 720p high-def video capabilities.^[15] The S8500 is, however, as of now, a defunct model. The Samsung S8530 Wave II was made available in November 2010. It has a 3.7" Super Clear capacitive LCD touchscreen. It will be preloaded with the latest unreleased Bada OS 1.2^[10]

Criticism

Some publications have criticised Bada over the following issues:

• The external sensor API is not open-ended, preventing new types of sensors or unexpected technology developments from being added in the future.^[16]
• "Due to performance and privacy issues" Bada applications cannot access the SMS/MMS inbox or receive incoming SMS/MMS notifications^[17]
• The Bada application framework only allows one Bada application to run at a time. Multitasking applications is possible between the native applications and one Bada application.^{[citation needed]}
• Application fragmentation rejecting a software developers to support the platform