A lot has changed in the world of mobile games in the past 10 years and that's something we will be looking at in our new initiative which will see us reposting PocketGamer.biz articles from the past decade.
This week we consider Samsung's prolonged but ultimately failed attempt to create an alternative OS ecosystem to Android, which was called bada.
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When your OS has been specifically designed to make life easier for developers, managing to pull in 1,000 apps in its first year on the market would undoubtedly be considered a success.
If Samsung is to be believed, that's exactly what bada will achieve by the end of 2010; the manufacturer saying its position as a market leader will help drive the platform through its vital first few months.
"Bada has the potential to deliver huge volumes straight away because Samsung is now the world's number two handset maker," Samsung Mobile VP Dr. Justin Hong told Total Telecom during Mobile World Congress.
"We want to push feature phones into the mass-market, and get feature phone users into smartphones."
Going for a grand
As a result of this mass-market push, Samsung claims it will have a minimum of 1,000 apps on board by the end of the year. Hong also stated that the company's Wave handset, the first bada phone when it launches in April, should sell around 10 million units in 2010, and that subsequent mass-market phones will quickly follow.
"We plan to offer developer support in 20 countries. Bada is very important to Samsung but we're pursuing a multi-platform strategy," he continued.
Bada is set to enter a smartphone market already in the midst of a major OS battle, Android making significant ground in the States thanks to Motorola's Droid, Microsoft rejuvenating its mobile presence with Windows Phone 7, and Nokia working with Intel on new smartphone OS MeeGo.
It's a market so packed, in fact, that Samsung's South Korean rival LG recently ruled out working on its own proprietary OS until 2013, at the earliest.
[source: Total Telecom]
