I attended the Bada Developer event yesterday and here are my thoughts.

Samsung have created a complete eco system for their smartphone technology. This includes:
development environment in C++ for their phones
webkit browser allowing browser control in an app or external to app
appstore called samsung apps
ovi style services such as maps and storage (using Amazon S3)
side loader PC based store similar to desktop iTunes called Kies

Overall this has been a massive undertaking for them and it’s appeared in very impressive timescale. The phone itself is exceptional build quality and the screen colours are the best I’ve seen using Super Amoled tech. They seem to have based the system on an in house OS which has been heavily customised.

Incidently Samsung are also hedging their bets because they continue to develop with Microsoft Phone7 and Android. There is a rumour their upcoming tablet will be based on Android.

First impressions is that it’s a complete copy of Apple’s Eco system and a very valiant one. This includes the fact that I think its apps will only be installable from its own appstore after completing its own QA (this is an assumption not yet confirmed, since there may be deals with operators in this area too).

The conference went very deep into the programming approaches and personally I was put off by the level of complexity. C++ now seems very antiquated to me now after having used better languages for years and it seems they make the developer jump through hoops in order to optimise the performance. Considering there’s a 1GHz processor in the phone this is not necessary and making life hard for developers is not constructive. There are no UI building tools and programming a UI seems highly complex. However, if and when I do do some Bada apps I would probably rely heavily on use of the web control and create most of the UI in HTML/CSS; a technique used heavily on the iPhone.

Overall, very impressed. They claim to be selling 40M Bada devices by the end of the year (seems hard to believe that figure!!!) It’s a big play for Samsung and they are investing heavily in the developer eco system (eg most attendees got given phones yesterday).

By Robin Jewsbury

@Robinjewsbury of Alibro

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