Bada

Bada and the mobile software distributions to which it is related

After the announcement of Bada, the Wave S8500, which would eventually turn to be the first Bada-based phone, was first shown to the public at Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona in February 2010. Alongside Bada itself, some applications running on Bada were exhibited, including mobile videogames like Gameloft's Asphalt 5.[9] The Samsung Wave S8500, released in May that year,[10][11] sold one million handsets over the first four weeks on the market.[12]

According to Samsung, companies such as Twitter, EA, Capcom, Gameloft and Blockbuster revealed their support for the Bada platform by having arranged development partnerships with Samsung since before the launch, and shared a few insights about their vision for the future of mobile apps and how Bada would play a role in it. These were a showcase of what could be heard in a series of events held across the world during the year 2010, called Developer Days. In addition, it was made public the announcement of an incoming Bada Developer Challenge with a total prize of $2,700,000 (USD) throughout the launch event.[13] In May 2010, Samsung released a beta of their Bada software development kit (SDK), making it available to the general public as it had done with partners the previous December, to entice potential developers of applications for this platform.[14] In August 2010, Samsung released version 1.0 of the Bada SDK. A year later, in August 2011, version 2.0 of the Bada SDK was released.

The Samsung S8500 Wave was launched with version 1.0 of the Bada operating system. Samsung soon released version 1.0.2, which included minor fixes for European users.[15] The latest version 1.2 was released with the Samsung S8530 Wave II phone.[16] The alpha-version of Bada 2.0 was introduced on 15 February 2011, with the Samsung S8530 Wave II handset.

The current flagship Bada handset is the Samsung Wave 3 S8600, running Bada 2.0

With the release of the Samsung Wave, Samsung opened an international application store, Samsung Apps, for the Bada platform.[17] Samsung Apps has over 2400 applications. This store is also available for Android and Samsung feature phones.[18]

Samsung is to remove the Bada brand and market the new OS, Tizen, with its own apps and store. The new store has around 1000 applications for Tizen.[19]

Bada, as Samsung defines it, is not an operating system itself, but a platform with a kernel configurable architecture, which allows using either a proprietary real-time operating system hybrid (RTOS) kernel or the Linux kernel.[20] According to copyrights displayed by Samsung Wave S8500, it uses code from FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. Despite numerous suggestions, there is no known Bada device to date that is running the Linux kernel. Similarly, there is no evidence that Bada uses the same or similar graphics stack as the Tizen OS, in particular EFL.

The device layer provides core functions such as graphics, protocols, telephony and security. The service layer provides more service-centric features such as SMS, mapping and in-app-purchasing. To provide such features there is a so-called Bada Server. The top layer, the framework layer provides an application programming interface (API) 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, and Tab, has a web browser control based on the open-source WebKit, and features Adobe Flash, supporting Flash 9, 10, or 11 (Flash Lite 4 with ActionScript 3.0 support) in Bada 2.0. Both the WebKit and Flash can be embedded inside native Bada applications. Bada supports OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics API and offers interactive mapping with point of interest (POI) features, which can also be embedded inside native applications.[21] It supports pinch-to-zoom, tabbed browsing and cut, copy, and paste features.[22]

Bada supports many mechanisms to enhance interaction, which can be incorporated into applications. These include various sensors such as motion sensing, vibration control, face detection, accelerometer, magnetometer, tilt, Global Positioning System (GPS), and multi-touch.[14]

Native applications are developed in C++ with the Bada SDK, and the Eclipse based integrated development environment (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 an emulator which can run apps.

Picture being taken using the Samsung Wave 525 running on Bada 1.0

Some publications have criticized Bada 1.x over the following issues:

• In the beginning, all VoIP over Wi-Fi applications were banned which meant that popular applications such as Skype could not be used. In March 2011 this restriction was removed, allowing VoIP applications to run on the platform.[23]
• The external sensor API is not open-ended, preventing new types of sensors or unexpected technology developments from being added in the future by third parties.[24]
• Due to "performance and privacy issues", Bada 1.x applications cannot access the SMS/MMS inbox or receive incoming SMS/MMS notifications.[25] This limit was removed in version 2.0.
• Bada versions 1.x only allowed one Bada third party application to run at a time. Multitasking applications was only possible between the base applications and one Bada third party application.[26] This limit is removed since version 2.0.
• The GPS facility was poor in Bada 1.0. It was further updated in Bada 2.0.
• The lack of availability of popular applications was arguably one of the most important factors in the demise of Bada. The lack of developer and consumer support that caused this deficit could not be rectified by the Bada 2.0 update.

The Bada 2.0 version was shown at IFA 2011 in Berlin and was released in the end of December 2011 with a lot of new functions and improvements compared to version 1.2, introducing features such as:

• Full HTML5 support
• WAC 2.0 compatibility
• Full multitasking
• WiFi-Direct technology
• Adobe Flash Lite 4 (mobile Flash Player version, supports ActionScript 3.0 of Adobe Flash 10 and 11)
• Dolphin Browser 3.0 with download manager
• Smart-wallpapers
• Text-to-speech
• Voice recognition
• Vocal commands based on Vlingo
• Push notifications
• NFC (near-field communication technology)
• New security policies and protection functions
• New camera manager
• New GUI
• OpenAL
• Inclusion of new proprietary applications and services such as ChatON (instant messaging software), Caster (to share multimedia content and web pages with PC) and Music Hub (a music store similar to iTunes)

• Samsung S8500 (Wave) is the only device available supporting Bada at its initial release date.[27]
• Samsung S8530 (Wave II). Launched in November 2010. It shipped preloaded with Bada v1.2.[16]
• Samsung S5250 (Wave 525). Launched in October 2010.

By the end of 2011, Samsung released three new models, preloaded with Bada 2.0, ending the list of devices running on the short-lived Bada:[28]

• Samsung S8600 (Wave 3)
• Samsung S5380 (Wave Y)
• Samsung S7250 (Wave M)

The chart below show global sales of Bada smartphones from the second quarter of 2010 through the second quarter of 2013. Canalys, a technology market analysis company, estimated that Samsung shipped 3.5 million phones running Bada in Q1 of 2011.[29] This rose to 4.5 million phones in Q2 of 2011.[30]

According to Gartner, in Q1 2012 Bada gained a grow index of +43%, and rose to 2.7% market share (up from 1.9% in Q1 2011).[31]

In South Korea, the fiscal year is the same as the calendar year.

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