bada

For the village in Iran, see Badeh, Borujerd.

For the British drama school, see British American Drama Academy.

Bada

Bada 2.0 Home screen
Company / developer	Samsung Electronics
Programmed in	C (core), Java (UI), C++, Flash
Working state	Current
Source model	Mixed: open source and proprietary
Latest stable release	2.0.3 SDK / December 16, 2011 (2011-12-16)
Marketing target	Smartphone
Available language(s)	Multilingual
Kernel type	RTOS or Linux kernel
Default user interface	Graphical (Touchscreen)
Official website	www.bada.com

Bada
Hangul	바다
Revised Romanization	Bada
McCune–Reischauer	Pada

Bada (stylized as bada; Korean: 바다) is an operating system for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers. It is developed by Samsung Electronics. Its name is derived from "바다 (bada)", meaning "ocean" or "sea" in Korean. It ranges from mid-range to high-end smartphones.

To foster adoption of Bada OS, Samsung is reportedly considering releasing the source code under an open-source license, and expanding device support to include Smart TVs. Samsung has announced it will merge Bada into the Tizen project.

History

After the announcement, the Wave S8500 was first shown at Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona in February 2010. At that time, applications running on the first Bada phone were demonstrated, including Gameloft's Asphalt 5.

After the launch, companies such as Twitter, EA, Capcom, Gameloft and Blockbuster showed their support for the Bada platform.

In May 2010, Samsung released a beta of their Bada software development kit (SDK) to attract developers. Samsung also began the Bada Developer Challenge with a total prize of $2,700,000 (USD). In August 2010, Samsung released version 1.0 of the SDK.

In August 2011, Samsung released version 2.0 of the SDK. This new version provides many enhancements over its predecessors.

The first Bada-based phone was the Samsung Wave S8500, released in April, 2010, which sold one million handsets in its first 4 weeks on the market.

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, which included minor fixes for European users. The latest version 1.2 was released with the Samsung S8530 Wave II phone. The alpha-version of Bada 2.0 was introduced on February 15, 2011, with Samsung S8600 Wave III.

Samsung Apps

With the release of the Samsung Wave, Samsung opened an international application store, Samsung Apps, for the Bada platform.

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. It did not achieve this aim and had around 3000 applications at the end of the first quarter of 2011.^{[citation needed]}

Architecture

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 (RTOS) kernel, or the Linux kernel. 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, or 10 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. It supports pinch-to-zoom, tabbed browsing and cut, copy, and paste features.

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.

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.

Devices

Samsung's first phone running the Bada platform was the Wave S8500. The Wave is a slim touchscreen phone powered by Samsung's "Hummingbird" CPU (S5PC110), which includes a 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A8 CPU and a built-in PowerVR SGX 3D graphics engine, "Super AMOLED" screen and 720p high-def video capabilities.

The Samsung S8530 Wave II was made available in November 2010. It has a 3.7" Super Clear capacitive LCD touchscreen. It is preloaded with Bada 1.2.

At the end of August 2011, Samsung announced three new models which will all ship with Bada 2.0. The Samsung Wave 3 will be a high-end model featuring 1.4GHz CPU with integrated Adreno 205 GPU, 4" AMOLED screen and 5MP camera. The Wave M and Wave Y will be lower-priced models, using slower CPUs, smaller LCD screens, and lacking other features found in the Wave 3. Upgrade to previous devices has not been confirmed by Samsung.

Criticism

• All VOIP over wifi applications were banned which means that popular applications such as Skype cannot be used. In March 2011 this restriction was removed, allowing VOIP applications to run on the platform.

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.
• Due to "performance and privacy issues", Bada 1.x applications cannot access the SMS/MMS inbox or receive incoming SMS/MMS notifications.
• 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. This limit is removed since version 2.0.

However these issues are resolved in Bada 2.0. Samsung Bada 2.0 OS include also the following features: HTML5, full multitasking, Adobe Flash 11, smart-wallpapers, text-to-speech, push notification, near-field communication, new security policies and protection functions, and OpenAL. The next Bada version was shown at IFA 2011 in Berlin.

Market shares

According to Canalys, Samsung shipped 3.5 million phones running Bada in Q1 of 2011. This rose to 4.5 million phones in Q2 of 2011.

External links

• Official website
• bada Developers, official developer site
• Samsung Apps, applications for Samsung mobile devices
• bada History bada History