Samsung's Bada 2.0 to move to 'web-centric' apps, getting ad framework and multitasking

We're still hesitant to call Bada a "smartphone platform" in the same breath as Android and iOS -- but despite our best attempts to write it off, Samsung's homegrown handset platform keeps chugging and expanding to new hardware. A developer event in South Korea appears to have yielded the first details on what Bada 2.0 will bring when it launches next year, and needless to say, it adds a bunch of smartphone-worthy stuff to the mix: an honest-to-goodness ad framework of some sort, better support for apps that use web technologies, multitasking, NFC capabilities, and a brand new SDK that'll support Mac and Linux. We're still going to see a whole lot more hardware -- and a more cohesive story -- to justify why even low-end "smartphones" should be using Bada over Android, but it's an interesting development nonetheless.