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Is it Bada or Bust for Samsung?

The recent news from the Samsung camp is that they are going to drop support for the Symbian OS by end of the year. Instead, Samsung is concentrating its effort on promoting it’s own home-brewed OS called Bada.

While that’s to be expected, Samsung is also working with the upcoming Windows Phone 7 and Android OS for their future handsets. The move might imply that Samsung is looking at Symbian as the closest competitor to their own Bada platform.

The last handset made by Samsung that runs on Symbian was way back in February of 2009 and the only time I saw one was with the Omnia HD i8910.

On the other hand, aside from the Samsung Wave two new Bada-powered phones are coming out this month (Samsung S5330 Wave 2 Pro & Samsung S5250 Wave 2).

During the last Bada Developer Seminar with Samsung, they indicated that their Bada OS will be targeted more to their mid-range handsets giving way to Android for the high-end units.

The strategy makes sense and Samsung is betting heavily with Bada. It will be up to the developer community if the effort is well worth it. You guys think it’s Bada or bust for Samsung?

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Avatar for Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

27 Responses

  1. Avatar for John DC John DC says:

    i think with bada, samsung is trying to do an Android-like OS, which somewhat goes against the concept of Android which is open source

    it feels like they want to just get a piece of the pie from mobile ap developers

    it’s really hard to see bada flourishing with the same mobile ap market as Android or Apple or even Windows Mobile

    why waste time to develop an ap for an os solely for a single company when you can develop an almost similar one for Android which can be available to a bigger market

    so it’s bust for me

  2. Avatar for asus g60jx asus g60jx says:

    @techfreak

    i totally agree with your conclusion re: arena vs. the wave. but my point really was that i would rather put my money on an iphone or blackberry than a wave with a halfbaked bada that might not be fully developed if samsung decides to ditch it if they dont get the desired $$$$$$$$$$$$

  3. Avatar for bing bing says:

    I think the strategy for Samsung to have their own OS is very potent. In long term you don’t want to be a HW manufacturer for android where the only differentiator is HW design.
    They need it to differentiate themselves from the pack. HTC, Moto, SE, LG and other chinese vendors are competitor with android. These vendors has a very different situation than samsung, they have a very small portion of a pie. They have nothing to lose but everything to gain using android. Samsung has established themselves with a very good distribution channel and give then a head start with bada. I’m not saying that Bada will be the winner but they have a fighting chance and it makes a lot of sense. There will be multiple platforms left standing when this dust settles. That is Symbian+Meego bridge by Qt API, Android, Bada, blackberry and iOS. Poor the vendors that only support android as they will cannibalize each other.

  4. Avatar for frragglerocker frragglerocker says:

    @Bokoi:

    why don’t you ask TechFreak regarding Omnia users, he seems to know a lot of stats on Samsung

    samsung dropping symbian is not unexpected, the writings were already on the wall, it’s just surprising how pragmatic it was done

    i agree though that symbian still needs a lot of work to catch-up as a touch ui, hope their latest would be able to address a lot of the previous problems/complaints

    as for me, i’m going android (2.1/2.2)

  5. Avatar for Bokoi Bokoi says:

    @ frragglerocker
    may i ask how many reported i8910 Omnia users were there?

    symbian on samsung is a bust. as for bada, we’ll see next year. for me, it is way better than symbian. but still i would prefer symbian for non touch screen phones. loved my E61i, E63, E71 and E52. boring ui, but works for me. until wave came along.

  6. Avatar for frragglerocker frragglerocker says:

    @Techfreak: the BADA OS was officially launched December last year (that’s why I said it’s almost a year old). Got the SDK to prove it. Anyway there’s also this link from BADA.COM:

    http://www.bada.com/samsung-launches-open-mobile-platform/

    @Bokoi:

    Some i8910 Omnia owners might disagree with you

    like i said the move is UNDERSTANDABLE but not too sure those who have Samsung Symbian phones would be happy with this, i8910 is not a cheap phone and was released only last year.

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