I just went to the Samsung Bada Developer day in London on June 18th, 2010 (I'm currently on vacation over there). They gave us a nice little free Samsung Wave phone. If you don't know yet, Bada is yet another new C++ mobile platform environment, all complete with its own app store, that's currently being pitched to the worldwide developer community.

[Since a few of you have asked that I publish this email message on a blog, so you could link to it, and have asked some follow-up questions, I'm posting this message on here, plus I'll add some context and I'll be sure to answer all your questions before the same event happens in San Francisco on June 22nd, 2010.]

First Impressions:

Bada is still at a very early phase, but the Samsung Wave is a nice phone, and the two games I've played on it so far are some of the slickest games I've ever played on ***any*** mobile phone. The speakers hinted at the possibilities of combining their Samsung TVs and other Samsung electronics with their Bada platform, but they didn't want to elaborate (they didn't seem to have much of a plan on that front yet).

The free developer phone is definitely worth having, super fast and super-crisp touch-screen display (gsm, at least the one I got in the UK). Its handy camera does on-the-fly panorama stitching, plus has a rapid-fire mode, and can do a host of other things. And the Bada/C++ platform is promising as well, but I think they said it's nine months old. And it shows. Samsung put a lot of effort into producing high quality games with very good partners, but some of its other areas are still very alpha.

Samsung is definitely not as open as Google, but they have some interesting ideas. Their main thing seems to be quality control and quality assurance. For instance, they have a seven-day app review process, but if they reject your app, they'll take screenshots/record a movie, and fill out a report to tell you how you can fix your app and/or reproduce any of the bugs/styling/usability issues they've found. Plus, they have a very detailed checklist that you should go through, and make sure to check, before even submitting an app.

They also said that many of their users liked to install their free apps on their phones (through their PC software) which makes sense to me (their Desktop app is a good one, and as a user, I can see myself mostly using that to do installs).

Otherwise, pricing is still fuzzy. They're **aiming** for a 70/30 split (with the 70% going to the developer). Note the carefully-crafted word "aiming" which is a lot more upfront than with Nokia. Nokia says they share 70/30, but they'll only give you 70% **of** 70% when the app is paid through operator-billing (resulting in only 49% overall). And speaking of operator-billing, it seems they already have that part set up (at least in the UK on Vodafone, which is the prepaid UK sim card I already had before going into the conference). Upgrading a game from a lite to a paid version on my new phone seems as easy as clicking 'ok' to send an sms.

And as to them competing with Android. It just seems that Samsung is a very big company, with many departments doing different things. That's at least how one Samsung employee described his company to me (which is not a good sign, I see Nokia the same way).

And one executive in that group speaking at the beginning referred to them wanting to create the next blue ocean, meaning that his group was aiming to dominate the entire space by creating its own new category, but I'm afraid he seemed completely out of touch with the current realities of his industry (that is, unless he was referring to the marriage of TV and the Bada Mobile platform).

If anyone is pursuing a blue ocean strategy (as referred by the business book by the same name), Google is the one that's doing it. Google is taking 0% from its own app stores/markets (giving away the entire 30% of commissions to the operators and/or handset manufacturers, plus they're giving away a percentage of the rev-shares of all the google ads that are going through the cell phone networks that are being received on Android handsets). Furthermore, Google is giving away the source to everybody (including Mainland China, that despite all the recent frictions its government had with Google, has chosen to standardize entirely its own forks of the Android platform, version 1.6 and 2.0 I believe). And let's not forget the contests, Google has had two Android app contests at its very beginning, to encourage app creation, with each contest giving away 25 million dollars in cash prizes. Compared to that Samsung is only giving away 2.7 million dollars in cash prizes (overall, that's 18 times less, a mere pittance compared to Google, not to mention the tens of thousands of free developer handsets Google has been giving away to every mobile developer/game developer out there).

So if anyone is pursuing a blue ocean strategy as the Bada executive was alluding to, Google is the one, and the Samsung Bada group is not even trying in that respect (otherwise, they would also be giving away the source to their hardware competitors, and also giving away the revenues to the operators coming from its app store, and clearly that's not what they're doing).

So overall, most of the developers and content owners I've met at the Bada Developer day are just taking the wait and see attitude with regards to the Bada platform (except for at least one or two developers that were interested in participating in the app contest, and two entrepreneurs/business people were at least interested in partnership opportunities with Samsung, but that's all). This is not to say that Samsung isn't an extremely respected company, especially in manufacturing and quality control, with extremely deep pockets, that has done extremely well in recent years, but the Bada platform just isn't the powder keg right now that one might be expecting from such a company -- although it's definitely worth taking a second look in one or two years as the new Bada platform matures and as Samsung hopefully starts adapting its current strategy to the current realities of the marketplace.

And technically speaking, Bada is not unlike Symbian C++, its development environment is done on Eclipse, (so in that sense, I've heard several people comparing it to Android), but it (or at least, its simulator) can only be run on Windows-only (just like Symbian does). And many of the workarounds that Symbian C++ had to do to make C++ work on the mobile platform, without hogging all the memory, and without leaking memory, Bada C++ had to do very similar things as well. So I'd say, it's definitely been heavily influenced by the Symbian C++ approach, and will probably attract C++ developers from some of the Nokia platforms at least.

Anyway, that's all for now. Definitely, go to this event even if it's full, insist to be put on their waiting list, the chance of getting a Samsung Wave phone is worth it, plus the free valet parking in San Francisco makes it so convenient to go to -- that there is really not any reason to not take the day off and go to it. There were many people that rsvp'd that didn't show up (chances are, you'll be able to get in even if you get yourself on the waiting list, that being said, those of us who were on the waiting list were the last ones to get free phones, so don't get the impression that you'll be guaranteed a free Samsung Wave -- even if you're lucky enough to get in in the event).
Enjoy,
Stephan (currently in the UK)