By now you're undoubtedly aware than Samsung has a new smartphone OS (
Bada) and touchscreen technology (
Super AMOLED) in the works. In this case, putting 2 and 2 together yields 14, a number that matches Samsung's February 14th press event at Mobile World Congress. How so? Well, first of all, Sammy is promoting the Samsung Unpacked teaser page from its Bada site. The ocean-themed teaser ("bada" means "ocean" in Korean) says, "on 2.14 a new mobile from Samsung is born. See it first in Barcelona." A quick look at the teaser site's source reveals the keywords "Bada," "smartphone," and "AMOLED." In other words, you can bet that Samsung will be unveiling a 3.3-inch, 800 x 480 pixel Super AMOLED (
already rumored for a next week reveal) touchscreen Bada phone on February 14th.
P.S. The image above comes
courtesy of GSM Arena. While the site won't say what the device is on the left it's clearly running Samsung's
Bada UI and is likely AMOLED judging by those deep blacks. The display is also slightly smaller than the iPhone 3G's 3.5-inch display. Gee... what could it be?
posted February 9th 2010 6:52AM
Bada Bing bada bang Bada booom
@StewieGriffin Or just badass.
@StewieGriffin
judging from those pics.... seems like this belongs in the KIRF section.
@theedude You mean the device on the right, right?
@hmmwv
no, I mean the device on the left.
I'm not an Apple fan by any means, but it looks like they just deleted a column from the iPhone OS and put the page indicator on the top.
Am I wrong for thinking that the picture of the Bada homescreen looking strikingly familiar??
Samsung has a history of releasing phones with high powered specs but crap UI's, which inevitably lead to crap phones, and so far history looks like it's repeating itself.
@StewieGriffin The software, whose name is based on the Korean for "ocean," is designed to be open and will compete directly against rivals like Android or LiMo. It will be based on universal standards and won't consider even core aspects of the OS off-limits: http://su.pr/1XisQ3
@StewieGriffin Is this one? http://bit.ly/no-more-gg-for-you-a
very cool .
@appleipad
Is it strange that I scroll down the page and read the "Downranked into oblivion" posts just so I can laugh at them and click "-"?
Yay, OLED, the screen technology that WEARS OUT!
@Information Central
The operating life of OLED is actually longer than LCD. Try again.
@Information Central
so, totally not like every consumer electronic device that has a life span built in ergardless? I can't remember the stats exactly but you'd need to have the screen on for 5 years continuously for it to wear out. are you going to have the same phone/pmp for 5 years? tv's is another matter perhaps, but get a sense of perspective. Personally i'd take those contrast ratios over an lcd that might last longer than I want to have the device but looks washed out.
@Information Central just like your credibility as "information central"
@Information Central
i heard iphone 4g will use OLED
oops, 180 degree turn needed
@Information Central
haha wow you failed.
@safe travels
Actually they last 5 years only if you limit yourself to eight hours a day usage so lots of heavy users will kill these displays much quicker. Why would you invest in a phone with such a short life?
Just because you will by the new hotness in a few years shouldn't mean you throw your old phone over a wall, I would think people would want tough resiliant tech in their phones so it can become a secondary phone or given to a relative if they want a newer one.
I know that long after my n900 stops being cutting edge I'm still gonna keep it as a multimedia/internet tool.
@yomachaser : Eight hours of actually having the screen lit on the phone per day is far more than most users are likely to experience. Allowing 8 hours a day for sleeping, that would mean you have to be actually texting on the phone every other minute the whole time you are awake.
@fighterfelix
No. Better technology needed before OLED can be taken seriously on a mobile device.
As per the above screenshot, I can't tell you how many times I'm looking at my iPhone sideways
@Prevacator Actually, mass production OLEDs do wear out faster (although some lab-based prototypes have managed to overcome this) but the real problem is that the blue pixels wear out much faster than the green/red ones meaning that your display starts off looking very blue and ends up looking green/yellow.
Also, even worse, because OLED fades on a per pixel basis, it suffers screen burn like old CRTs did, except worse because the rate of fading is higher and mobile UIs tend to stick things in the same spot of the display all the time.
On the flipside, if you insist on using your phone in a pitch black room and angling the display away from you by 60 degrees then and don't mind with it burning through your battery three times faster than an LCD while looking at a web page, yes, it's great :)
Has anybody who has an iPhone actually ever seen the screen looking that bad or maybe, just maybe, could Samsung be setting up a very artificial test to make their product look better?
@Wesscoast Better technology needed? Yea, lets see what you say if the iPhone starts using one in a few months. Let me guess, theirs will be more advanced and magical?
@fnuky no question the iphone doesn't look as bad as that under normal use. But in a darker room, it does look extremely washed out.
Then again, on a sunny day, it will be more visible than the samsung.
It's give and take, but for many of us the downsides are worth it if you use your phone indoors most of the time. The AMOLED doesn't look as great outside, but it's still functional enough.
@sockatume What you said makes no sense, smartphone usage mostly needs the screen lit.
Unless you can tell me a way to handle mail,twitter,app use (not games eg things like IRC),video conference and web use with the screen off this shorter life span screen will be a problem for some folks.
You take a work day with any mix of the stuff I listed and throw in any use time at home and yeah lots of users will burn these things out in only a few years and I'm sorry I have 12 year old monitors that still work so this limit needs to be improved before it's ready for to take over from lcd.
@PerryAJ
Both LCD and OLED look bad outside.... OLED screens look fine in anything but direct sunlight, much like LCDs, except they apparently look a tiny bit worse (they are both unreadable in my mind). I use my PMP (which has an AMOLED screen) outdoors all of the time, and it still looks amazing. The whole unreadable things is just direct sunlight and is blown way out of proportion.
@Mr Smiley Me too this is getting old.
"The biggest technical problem for OLEDs is the limited lifetime of the organic materials.[46]... Additionally, as the OLED material used to produce blue light degrades significantly more rapidly than the materials that produce other colors"
Do a little research before you embarrass yourselves next time.
Oh man, that screen looks as clear as a starry night...
@bureX It won't in a bright room, unfortunately.
@bureX
Yea because viewing your phone at a 20 degree angle is important.
@Kid Red
thank you!
@Kid Red
Talking about the blacks, not the viewing angle.
@Ethan
OLED screens look just fine outside and in a "bright room" (I am assuming you are not talking about mental ward bright). I have used my PMP with and AMOLED screen outside and in well lit rooms. Only in direct sunlight is it unreadable, which is my experience with LCD screens in direct sunlight.
The more AMOLED the better. Incredible screen quality. Can't wait till the day laptops that are equipped with AMOLED screens becomes common place. Battery life will shoot up, especially in netbooks.
@Prevacator I owned an otherwise nice Samsung UltraTOUCH with AMOLED display. It did nothing for the battery that didn't even last a day. Further, like all such displays, it was useless outside. (Something Samsung claim to have solved with super AMOLED, so let's see what transpires.)
Took you a while with this one 'gadey.
Looks good eh, and with Eldar saying Bada rocks, im looking closely at how this one develops.
My eyes - they bleed!
Thats the Samsung Monte S5620
I hope for Samsung's sake this phone has a physical keyboard because 3.3 inches in a bit small compared to other touchscreen only options already available.
Iphone 3.5"
Nexus One 3.7"
HD2 4.3"
Oh why does it look like the icons from the TouchWiz OS!?
What about apps for a this new OS?
@Gadgety
Given Samsun's record of forgetting about their own phones after 6 months Id say forget about any apps.
Plus do we really need another app store?
A picture is worth a thousand words.... lovely.
But why did they invest in "Bada OS" at all? Android is there, and comes with more than 20,000 apps. What's their logic? I'm not going for a brand new OS.
@TareG
YEah, isn't Bada their third "smartphone" OS? They used PalmOS for a while, then WinMo..
@TareG
Maybe they want to do something Android doesn't offer? If they make their own OS, they can do whatever they want.
I do find it interesting, though, how Samsung plays the market. A few years ago, I had lunch with an ex-coworker of mine who had then-recently become a Samsung executive, and he pointed out that Samsung makes devices with every major smartphone OS on the market except the vendor-locked ones. They had WinMo, Symbian, PalmOS, and were gearing up to launch their Android devices. I see this as just an extension of that, with Bada as a relative of Maemo and WebOS.
Another OS? Competition is good, but we have iphone OS, winmo, android, webOS, symbian, blackberry, sometimes too much variety is bad.
@Luffy
u forgot MAEMO
@Luffy
Bullshit. More choices means more innovation. Standardization means a complete halt to innovation.
I'd like to see every device manufacturer develop their own OS. C'mon, HTC, you know you want to make a Sense OS.
@jgp -- "More choices means more innovation. Standardization means a complete halt to innovation."
True. But having more platforms means developers have to start creating apps for 3, 4 or 5 different platforms. And they aren't doing that now already.
Do you really want *another* platform?
You guys notice the white bar on the top with the empty spaces next to it... Me think page scroll like iPhone
@FritzJ92
really? you think the phone on the left was in some way inspired by the phone on the right?
really?and the page scrolls thing tipped you off. really.
someone give this guy a medal.
[/SNL]
@Wesscoast
I would like a gold medal please :)