Bada


Bada is a discontinued operating system for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers. It was developed by Samsung Electronics. Its name is derived from "바다 ", meaning "ocean" or "sea" in Korean. It ranges from mid- to high-end smartphones.
To foster adoption of Bada OS, since 2011 Samsung reportedly had considered releasing the source code under an open-source license, and expanding device support to include Smart TVs. Samsung announced in June 2012 intentions to merge Bada into the Tizen project, but would meanwhile use its own Bada operating system, in parallel with Google Android OS and Microsoft Windows Phone, for its smartphones.
All devices running Bada were branded under the Wave name, unlike Samsung's devices that are branded under the name Galaxy, which do not encompass the whole range of Samsung devices running Android.
On 25 February 2013, Samsung announced that it would stop developing Bada, moving development to Tizen instead. Bug reporting was finally terminated in April 2014.

History

After the announcement of Bada, the Wave S8500, which would eventually turn to be the first Bada-based phone, was first shown to the public at Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona in February 2010. Alongside Bada itself, some applications running on Bada were exhibited, including mobile videogames like Gameloft's Asphalt 5.
The Samsung Wave S8500, released in May that year, sold one million handsets over the first four weeks on the market.
According to Samsung, companies such as Twitter, EA, Capcom, Gameloft and Blockbuster revealed their support for the Bada platform by having arranged development partnerships with Samsung since before the launch, and shared a few insights about their vision for the future of mobile apps and how Bada would play a role in it. These were a showcase of what could be heard in a series of events held across the world during the year 2010, called Developer Days. In addition, it was made public the announcement of an incoming Bada Developer Challenge with a total prize of $2,700,000 throughout the launch event.
In May 2010, Samsung released a beta of their Bada software development kit, making it available to the general public as it had done with partners the previous December, to entice potential developers of applications for this platform.
In August 2010, Samsung released version 1.0 of the Bada SDK. A year later, in August 2011, version 2.0 of the Bada SDK was released.

Versions

The Samsung S8500 Wave was launched with version 1.0 of the Bada operating system. Samsung soon 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 15 February 2011, with the Samsung S8530 Wave II handset.
The current flagship Bada handset is the Samsung Wave 3 S8600, running Bada 2.0

Samsung Apps

With the release of the Samsung Wave, Samsung opened an international application store, Samsung Apps, for the Bada platform. Samsung Apps has over 2400 applications. This store is also available for Android and Samsung feature phones.
Samsung is to remove the Bada brand and market the new OS, Tizen, with its own apps and store. The new store has around 1000 applications for Tizen.

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 hybrid 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 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, 10, or 11 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 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, and multi-touch.
Native applications are developed in C++ with the Bada SDK, and the Eclipse based integrated development environment. 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.

Criticism of Bada 1.x

Some publications have criticized Bada 1.x over the following issues:
The Bada 2.0 version was shown at IFA 2011 in Berlin and was released in the end of December 2011 with a lot of new functions and improvements compared to version 1.2, introducing features such as:
By the end of 2011, Samsung released three new models, preloaded with Bada 2.0, ending the list of devices running on the short-lived Bada:
The chart below show global sales of Bada smartphones from the second quarter of 2010 through the second quarter of 2013. Canalys, a technology market analysis company, estimated that Samsung shipped 3.5 million phones running Bada in Q1 of 2011. This rose to 4.5 million phones in Q2 of 2011.
According to Gartner, in Q1 2012 Bada gained a grow index of +43%, and rose to 2.7% market share.
In South Korea, the fiscal year is the same as the calendar year.
Fiscal year
and quarter		Percentage of
global smartphone sales		Smartphones sold
Q2 20100.90.6
Q3 20101.10.9
Q4 20102.02.0
Q1 20111.91.9
Q2 20111.92.1
Q3 20112.22.5
Q4 20112.13.1
Q1 20122.73.8
Q2 20122.74.2
Q3 201235.2
Q4 20121.32.7
Q1 20130.71.37
Q2 20130.40.84