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Samsung to release two Bada 2.0 handsets with NFC in Q4, software update in July?
Some of you Samsungers are probably anticipating the snazzy Wave 578 due out in May or June outside the US, but the sad news is it won't be shipped with the upcoming Bada 2.0 OS. Fret not, though, as Russian blog Bada World claims to have obtained some juicy details that'll cheer up Bada fanatics. The above slide -- apparently sourced from a Samsung France conference from a few days ago -- lists a pair of new but unnamed handsets that'll pack the new software, along with 7.2Mbps HSDPA, Bluetooth 3.0, and the seemingly trendsetting NFC. The difference between these two phones? One of them appears to be the flagship Bada 2.0 model, which expects a September launch with a 3.65-inch HVGA display, a 5 megapixel main camera, plus a VGA secondary camera. The second device will follow a month later, sporting a smaller 3.14-inch QVGA screen and just a 3 megapixel imager. In related news, TNW India reports that Bada 2.0 will be "first experienced in India" around July, though no hardware is mentioned here. This could imply that existing Bada users in India -- where Samsung's R&D develops 30 percent of Bada applications -- may be one of the first to obtain the 2.0 update, and it shouldn't be long before the rest of the world get their share of this piping hot pie. Anyhow, be rest assured that we'll keep our eyes peeled open for more Bada 2.0 news -- it'll be interesting to see where Samsung's next big push will take us.
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.
