bada – The new kid on the block, part1(3) -June 10th

By Markus Gausling

On the World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona this year Samsung has announced the Samsung Wave (also known as Samsung S8500). The device is a new smartphone with a 3.3 inch Super AMOLED WVGA capacitive touch display that has a 5 megapixel camera. It can playback and record HD video with 1280x720 pixels and it supports the latest WLAN-n and Bluetooth 3.0 standards. The device is about to be available in stores any time now.

While this is already quite impressive the more interesting thing –for me as a developer- is that it is based on Samsungs new bada platform which was announced in Q4 of 2009 and where an application development SDK was released these days.

So what is bada then? bada is Korean and stands for ocean. It is a closed platform in the sense that Samsung owns and controls it. bada is not an open source platform and only intended to be shipped with Samsung devices. It has open interfaces for application developers though.

According to Samsung (http://www.bada.com/whatisbada/) bada is already available for nearly 10 years and was shipped in a number of devices during that time. Designating it bada means it was enhanced with new features such as multi-touch, social APIs and a new UI.

The figure shows the four layers of the bada platform and the different types of applications that can run on bada.

The platform supports four kinds of applications:

• Native C++ applications based on the interfaces provided by the Framework layer.
• J2ME applications (MIPD 2.0)
• Widgets based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript and executed by the platforms WebKit.
• Flash app´s executed by an integrated Adobe Flash player or embedded into native applications.

The bada platform was designed to run on smartphone devices as well as on cheaper feature phones. To make this possible bada has a configurable kernel architecture which can be based on Linux as underlying OS or some other RTOS.

Follow this bada educational blog. Next chapter 2(3) is about Developing bada C++ apps.