Thoughts on Samsung bada

Samsung’s unveiling of bada mobile OS platform today was a disappointment. Nothing substantial was revealed nor did Samsung have a single bada prototype on display. But more importantly, the question in everyone’s mind was “Do we need another mobile platform?”

Well, if you consider Samsung’s monetary goal, then yes. To cut the long story short, bada would enable Samsung to get more developers to create apps for their phones that will be sold on their Application Store and in return, earn revenue for world’s second largest handset maker.

Samsung has already sold 40m touchscreen phones in 2009 with the majority of share coming from non-smartphones aka feature phones. Now though these speak volumes, the profit margin of each feature phone sold is considerably less compared to a smartphone.

With lesser margin to earn through hardware sales, it basically comes down to the software. Samsung’s current proprietary OS didn’t allow them to cash in on the app front (Samsung’s latest research also confirms that) and although Samsung opened up its TouchWiz UI to accept new widgets, it seemingly didn’t generate enough interest to lure most developers.

This is where a new mobile platform comes into picture. Bada is created to achieve three goals – address developer’s woes by opening up the platform and allowing devs to take advantage of platform’s various features; generate revenue for Samsung through sale of apps on its platform and additionally give user to do more on his feature phone.

Samsung’s mantra here seems “keep developers happy, the company and consumers will automatically be happy” and I think if Samsung hits the right notes with devs, bada can easily make it through. Most of feature phone users doesn’t care which OS powers their phone until they can satisfactorily exploit the usability of their phone.

So what do you think? Will bada work? Let us know in the comments.