Android has been around for quite some years now, and though it was supported mostly by Motorola, it has survived to see the light of 2010. And it did raise itself with a bang I would say, looking at the number of Android based phones launched in the market by various companies in recent past. So much so that Nokia had to dump their plans for MeeGo, the OS they were developing, and looked towards windows to power their future smartphones.
Samsung has not kept itself aloof from the smartphone revolution, and to keep itself in competition, they have embraced Android for their Galaxy line of smartphones. And they have done pretty impressively with the Galaxy series, starting from Galaxy i9000, about a year back, to Galaxy TAB and Galaxy ACE, which were launched very recently.
But ACE is not the only ace they are banking on. Because they have another “ace” under their sleeve, which they introduced to the market at the Mobile World Congress a year back. It was the Wave series of smartphones, powered by BADA(meaning ocean) OS, an open source Operating System developed in-house by Samsung. When it was introduced a year back, though it looked a decent OS to many, critics and tech geeks were skeptical about the commitment from Samsung towards BADA. Wave s8500 was a very successful phone with its 1GHz processor and the Super AMOLED Screen, which was the USP of the phone. Then they had introduced lots of more wave series phones(cheap and high priced ones) to the market, forcing the competition to enter the competition in terms of pricing and specifications. They held a developers challenge and made good their promise of giving out about 2,700,000$, including a 300,000$ top price, for the top rated applications created for BADA by developers worldwide. And after all this, they announced the BADA 2.0 OS, which is said to be a true Smartphone OS, with real multi-tasking and many other features. With all these developments, the commitment on the part of Samsung towards BADA is unquestionable. Infact, they are believed to be working in the direction of making BADA, a platform independent OS. They want all its smart gadgets to work on BADA in future, starting with televisions. So even though they have an Android device line up, it might be just to stay in he game while BADA is developed fully. It seems that Nokia forget to use this trick when they dumped the development of MeeGo, and the support to Symbian while embracing Windows. It might be some time till Nokia completes a successful product cycle of Windows phones.
And now Samsung has announced that, BADA application download center is reaching the 100 million download mark very soon!! The last count was above 99.8 million. And to celebrate the 100 million mark, they will come out with a very good offer for the Wave phone owners very soon. I just hope to grab the offer on time.
Who would have thought a year back, that BADA would have survived the Android Onslaught!! Long Live BADA!!!