Samsung Announces Bada 2: Multitasking, HTML5, New SDK, And More

If you’re reading this in the U.S., chances are pretty solid that you’ve never laid eyes on a phone powered by Samsung’s fledgling smartphone platform, Bada. Don’t feel too bad; for one reason (*coughiPhonecough*) or another (*coughAndroidcough*), Samsung has made more or less no effort to launch Bada here.

Elsewhere, though, Bada handsets are selling in droves. The company expects to push over 5 million Bada handsets off the shelves by the end of this year, and they’re looking to push another 10 million out in the first half of 2011. It’s no 300,000 units per day, but it’s really not too shabby for a platform used by one manufacturer, in a handful of countries, on but a single device (so far.)

Looking to celebrate their successes so far, Samsung has just announced Bada 2.0 at a developer day event in South Korea.

What’s new for Bada 2.0:

  • New UI
  • NFC (Near Field Communications), potentially for a mobile payment system.
  • HTML5 support with a “Web Application Framework”
  • FlashLite 4 (Rudimentary Adobe Flash support)
  • Software Development Kit for Mac/Linux
  • Multitasking
  • Push notification support
  • Carrier billing support

It’ll be a good while before we see any handsets running Bada 2.0, with Samsung planning on launching at least 5 handsets running either Bada 1.1 or 1.2 before launching 2.0 sometime around the middle of 2011. Fear not though, early adopters: as long as we’re hearing correctly, it sounds like Samsung plans to upgrade all current and upcoming Bada handsets to 2.0 in time.

[Source: SamsungHub]