Samsung will release its first smartphone running on its proprietary bada platform in the next few weeks, a key part of the No. 2 handset maker's goal of tripling its smartphone sales this year to roughly 18 million units.
"You need a proprietary system to drive growth in the smartphone market and bada will do the job, as it is designed to support all segments from low to high end," Lee Ho-soo, who runs Samsung's bada efforts, told the Reuters Global Technology Summit.
However, the crowded smartphone market will likely pose a challenge for bada, which means "ocean" in Korean. Although Samsung will launch the company's high-end Wave phone using the bada platform in Britain and Germany within the next few weeks, the company must still attract developer support for bada.
"We have a very strong response from application developers...and we see strong potential in bada to become a major operating system," Lee said. The company announced the beta release of the bada software development kit earlier this month and plans to open its bada application storefront in June.
Samsung will continue to work with Symbian, Windows and Android, but one-third of its smartphones released this year will be based on bada, Lee said. "Markets will continue to remain fragmented and competition will only get tougher as players will push hard to develop new system or upgrade existing ones to offer customized products for mobile carriers," he added.
For more:
- see this Reuters article
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