14 DAY TRIAL // The second most important announcement made by Samsung at the 2011 Mobile World Congress, besides the grandiose launch of the Galaxy S II and Galaxy Tab 10.1, was the official introduction of its proprietary bada 2.0 mobile platform.
The bada 2.0 announcement was made during the bada Developer Day, which was hosted at MWC as part of the Application Developer Conference at AppPlanet, on Tuesday, February 15th.
JK Shin, president and head of Samsung's Mobile Communications Business, said “We are delighted with the success of the original bada platform, which was launched at MWC last year. We have looked to build on this with bada 2.0 by creating a versatile and robust platform capable of continuing the success of its predecessor.”
“We have also created and strengthened an eco-system around bada, ensuring developers are able to create the apps our customers need and want,” continued Shin.
Among the new features offered by the recently announced bada 2.0 one can notice support for Near Field Communication (NFC), Web applications including HTML 5 and WAC, multitasking, scalable UI, voice recognition, as well as improved UI.
In addition, bada 2.0 offers an improved experience for users who opt to purchase a Wave series device, thanks to the included personalized lock-screen, layout management and 3D sound.
For developers, bada 2.0 packs a new and improved Software Development Kit (SDK), which comes with additional features such as an advanced code analyzer and faster simulator that enables devs to create applications for the bada OS faster and easier.
The first smartphone to run bada 2.0, the Samsung Wave 578, was also showcased at the MWC and seems to be a mid-budget device, which is expected to be launched on the market in May. Samsung will release bada 2.0 for the Wave S8500 and the S8530 in June 2011.
As a side note, the announcement of the bada 2.0 mobile platform coincided with the company's anniversary of the launch of the first bada-based smartphone, the original Samsung S8500 Wave.
