Yes there is a new entrant in the app space and even in the OS space. Joining Android, iPhone, Windows, Palm’s WebOS, Blackberry, Maemo and not to forget Symbian… Samsung wades into the battle of the OSs. To get a good share in the mobile market Samsung has launched it’s own Linux based mobile OS named “Bada” which means Ocean in Korean.

Professing to be a totally open platform or OS Samsung says that it enables a richer user experience in applications on Samsung ONLY mobile devices and helps developers to create UI rich applications very easily. Samsung says that the design principles of bada aim to deliver simple, intuitive, and innovative user experiences through innovative visual design. Samsung bada includes a next generation UI framework with feature sets and design elements that facilitate leading-edge user interfaces for every bada application.

The other interesting thing is that the carriers will also have the option of customizing the OS to suit their own requirements. bada will definitely give a tough competition to other Linux based mobile OS’s like Google Android and Nokia Maemo. Samsung is  obviously also planning to launch it’s own App Store.

Some additional UI tools include the ability to embed the Adobe® Flash® Player and the WebKit Internet browser directly into native bada applications, allowing seamless integration of premiere UI technologies. Also, the bada map control is easily embedded in your applications to deliver interactive mapping and routing with POI features for your users.

What does this mean for the other OSs that Samsung use today ? Well the forecast would have Symbian gone entirely by 2011 from Samsung phones and Microsoft’s OS at just 20%by 2012 where it makes up 80% of Samsung phones today. Not sure how this will affect Android but it would seem hard to understand that Samsung continue supporting Android against their own champion. The reach and actual popularity of Samsung phones (around 20% of the global market) means that bada will obviously be a force to reckon with if just by shear numbers!

Samsung has a vision of “Smartphone for everyone”, and by offering cheap Bada handsets as well as expensive ones, combined with a focus on in-app purchasing, Samsung hopes to entice developers with greater profits.

Samsung’s hoping to see an influx of applications thanks to the $2.7 million prize that’s been put up for grabs, and so far, EA and Gameloft have been signed up to develop games for Bada.

Bada will initially run on Samsung’s proprietary SHP (Samsung Handset Platform) paired with Samsung’s upcoming TouchWiz 3.0 user interface. It will be entirely multitouch, supporting both resistive and capacitive touch screens. Hardware-wise, it’s chip-agnostic, and Samsung aims for the cheapest bada handsets to be cheaper than the cheapest Android ones. It won’t run on older phones, however, and the first bada handset will arrive somewhere in the first half of 2010.

Definitely an exciting space to watch and see how well they pull this off.

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