Samsung Bada impressions

There is just one thing that comes to mind when I say Bada(Ocean), and that word is flow. Why flow? Because with this OS, everything seems to be right where you need it to be. That was my first impression on Bada. Having used Touchwiz before (2.0) I was a little skeptic, but I was quickly charmed by Touchwiz 3.0. Samsung sure learned a lot from the criticism Touchwiz 2 received. No more widgets overlapping, no more moving widgets instead of swiping to the next homescreen. Touchwiz 3 is lightyears ahead of other Touchwiz version in terms of usability and even looks.

Now let's get on to the OS. Bada has everything packed in, all the apps you'll need, excepting a decent navigation app. The UI is simple and straightforward, I thing it's even simpler than iPhone's UI. It has the looks, friendliness and speed of a high-end feature phone packed in a smartphone platform.

However, the best thing about Bada in my opinion is the development platform. I managed to create a working app in a matter of days, having no knowledge or experience with neither the platform nor with the C++ language it uses. The development learning curve is very quick and the emulator is just brilliant.

Minding that a smartphone OS is as smart as it's application store grows, let's hope Bada's application store manages to round up a decent number of apps. The Bada Developer Challenge is a good start. Copying a successful model is not a bad thing and I'm glad Samsung did it.

Final conclusion: Judging from the developer's standpoint, there is nothing holding devs back from writing apps for this platform. Very easy to use SDK with a very good emulator means fast application development. This platform, if properly promoted and maintained, can be IMHO a powerful iOS and Android contender. The best part is that Samsung plans to run this platform not only on the high-end S8500, but also on lower tier phones that might just get the "smart" badge.

UPDATE:

Here is a demo of S8500 running Bada.