Valentine’s Day maybe a week away but Samsung has decided to celebrate the day a week before and after by giving away a bunch of paid apps for free to its users. Samsung is gifting its bada or Android users with free paid apps till February 21 and also a chance to win a $5 app voucher, in case a user downloads all the apps.

You can head down to Samsung Apps to check out the apps and supported devices as Samsung is also offering discounted apps for some devices.

Samsung Apps

Thanks, Mark!

Samsung has updated the bada SDK to v 2.0.4. Samsung has now fixed the packaging error that use the Ads library and allows badaIDE packaged apps to run through TestKit properly.

Developers can download the updated bada SDK from the developers site below.

Download Page

Samsung will merge its home-grown bada OS with Tizen OS, an executive has confirmed. In an interview with Forbes, Tae-Jin Kang, Senior Vice President of Samsung’s Contents Planning Team confirmed that they’ll merge both the operating systems.

Kang refrained from giving an exact timeline but said the work is “already underway” and will support backward compatibility with existing bada apps.

Samsung however, is yet to decide on how much the bada OS will be integrated with Tizen. Kang said bada could power lower-end and single-core phones whereas Tizen will go for high-end devices that aren’t powered by Android or Windows Phone.

Kang also hinted on releasing a “non-phone” bada device, which could mean Samsung could come up with a bada tablet or a TV in the near future.

Via

TomTom has entered in to a strategic deal with Samsung. Samsung will use TomTom maps and location content on their Wave 3 smartphone. TomTom will provide information to support daily location needs of Wave3 users, from navigation to search and find.

With this agreement, Samsung has now access to TomTom global maps and premium location content like map coverage for over 200 countries globally, providing over 35 million kilometers of road network, points of interest, 3D city maps and landmarks and visual orientation and more.

Thanks, Andrey source

Looks like the bada 2.0 update will be available in next year, at least to bada users in Turkey. According to a post by Samsung Turkey on its Facebook page, the new bada OS will be available to Turkey Wave I, Wave II, Wave 723, Wave 578 and Wave 575 users in 2012, which is kind of vague.

The original release date for bada 2.0 was by end of this year but the chances look slim considering we’re just 12 days away from the New Year.

Let’s hope the wait is worthwhile.

Thanks, Tahir!

Samsung has released a new SDK version for its bada OS. Available for download via bada Developers page, the bada v2.0.3 SDK improves existing and adds few new features.

The WQVGA resolution support has now gone from beta to final in the new SDK, additional language support for voice functions, test kit support that allows devs to install multiple apps on the target device, bada RSS builder to build apps using RSS feeds, performance improvements and more.

Download Page

Samsung has finally launched their flagship bada 2.0 phone and will be available first in France, which is bada’s biggest market. First shown at the IFA early this year, Wave 3 runs bada 2.0 OS and ups the hardware specs a little compared to the previous Wave flagship devices.

The 9.9mm thick Wave 3 comes in a full metal casing with anodized brushed aluminum and features 1.4GHz processor, 14.4Mbps HSPA, 4-inch WVGA Super AMOLED display, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n, Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth 3.0, 5MP camera with LED flash, VGA camera, support for various social network services including ChatOn and 1500mAh battery.

Samsung will also treat Wave 3 buyers with free apps and games like Camcard, Skyview and The Adventures of Tintin: The Game for a limited time.

Germany, Italy, Russia and other global markets will get the phone by end of this year.

Samsung today pushed a new bada SDK update for developers. Version 2.0.2 brings in some handy additions like the support for devices with WQVGA and ad library that will allow devs to use in-app ads.

Samsung has also opened its System privileged API groups that was closed to a few select developers previously.

bada Developers

bada’s project head, Justin Hong confirmed in a tweet that they’ve started working on the next version of bada aka bada 3.0. He also notes the team is in the “last phase of bada 2.0 device development,” which means the roll out for bada 2.0 for existing devices could start anytime soon.

Samsung had earlier promised to release the bada 2.0 update in Q4 of this year that begins from tomorrow.

Source|Via

It’s a known fact that Samsung is one of the key members of the LiMo Foundation and in the past, have dabbled with few devices running LiMo OS. Now the news comes from LiMo and Linux Foundation that they have come together to develop a new open-source OS called Tizen. Tizen will be an open-source project that will integrate the code of LiMo and MeeGo with standards support of HTML5 and WAC.

Both Samsung and Intel will lead the technical steering team, which indicates the future of the OS will most likely be in the hands of both these companies.

More interestingly, bada 2.0 SDK recently added support for HTML5 and WAC. Does that mean bada will integrate elements of Tizen or completely replace bada 2.0? We don’t know yet. But I think it should be more clear by next year.

Tizen’s first SDK will be released in Q1 2012 and devices in mid-2012.

Tizen OS