Samsung announced it expects to sell roughly 5 million bada-powered phones and notch 50 million bada application downloads by the end of this year--a notable milestone for the handset vendor's smartphone operating system.
Samsung officially took the wraps off its bada smartphone platform in December 2009; bada (translating to "ocean" in Korean) promises an open, feature-rich platform based on Samsung's TouchWiz user interface. Samsung has so far shipped a number of bada phones, including the Wave II, Wave525, Wave533, Wave575 and Wave723, in countries across the world--though the platform has yet to make its way to U.S. users.
Samsung's bada shipments still dwarf those of other smartphone platforms, including Symbian, BlackBerry and Android. However, 5 million shipments in a year is still notable in the highly competitive smartphone market, and is a reflection of the enormous weight that Samsung--the world's second largest mobile phone vendor by market share--brings to the game.
Indeed, bada represents only a small portion of Samsung's phone business. The company has confirmed that it expects to ship more than 300 million phones next year. Already this year the company has sold more than 3 million Galaxy S smartphones in the U.S. market alone. In addition to bada, Samsung supports the Android and Windows Phone 7 smartphone platforms.
Samsung shipped 71 million handsets worldwide during the third quarter of 2010, up 19 percent from 60.2 million units a year earlier, according to Strategy Analytics. Samsung's global market share reached 22 percent in the third quarter, inching up from 21 percent in the same period last year. The company sits between LG (at 9 percent) and Nokia (at 34 percent).
For more:
- see this Samsung release
- see this Unwired View article
- see this Reuters article
Related Articles:
Google, Samsung launch Android 2.3-based Nexus S smartphone
Samsung sells 1M GalaxyTab tablets
Analyzing the world's 10 largest handset makers
Samsung trumpets 3 million Galaxy S sales in U.S., unveils Continuum