Samsung is ramping up the anticipation for its bada platform, with the mobile giant turning its attention to the features developers can expect to utilise when it rolls out on handsets later in the spring.

Bada is Samsung's open platform designed to help developers pool various smartphone resources together via one single tool, and the company appears keen to expel the virtues of what it calls the service's "distinctive user experience (UX)".

Good looking

According to Samsung, getting new consumers au fait with bada in as smooth and quick a fashion as possible will be essential to its success, the company stating via bada's official website that "simply being new doesn't cut it anymore".

As a result, Samsung's UI TouchWiz has been incorporated into bada, as well as more than 30 "stylish common controls", with a Flash control and an integrated web browser also thrown into the mix.

"The distinctive UX features of bada let the developers deliver the user convenience which could be experienced in applications showcased with the new bada smartphone," Samsung added, revealing that studios should be able to grab a sneak peak of bada in action during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February.

Feeling flexible

But merely ticking feature-set boxes isn't enough for Samsung. Bada also apparently making it easier to make use of  graphics standards such as OpenGL.

According to the program's developers blog, bada goes further than simply offering guidelines for OpenGL programming, unlike some of the restrictions required by Android and iPhone.

"Bada has made it flexible for the developer to use his own approach by providing full support for EGL, OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0," states the blog.

"The learning curve is reduced to bare minimum and also the effort required for porting an existing OpenGL application is simpler on bada compared with other platforms."

Of course, it's worth pointing out that these supposed advantages over bada's competitors are being circulated by Samsung itself, but with bada handsets due to debut in Q1 2010, it won't be long before the industry finds out whether this new open platform lives up to its big billing.