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When Samsung announced its own software platform, Bada, in November, it seemed to be swimming against the tide towards multivendor mobile operating systems. Now, with Hewlett-Packard rumored to be about to launch a webOS tablet, and Motorola and HTC considering their own frameworks, Bada may be right on-trend for the growth of mass market smartphones. The Korean vendor has released a software developers' kit, SDK 1.0.0b2, ahead of the release of the first bada handset, the Wave, expected around midyear.

The development kit is available free to all interested developers and includes APIs (application programming interfaces), a user interface builder, a simulator and a debugger. Bada consists of an access layer, which is open to any developers and contains the user interfaces and APIs, but this runs on Samsung's existing proprietary OS. It could, in future, also be ported to third party OSs - the giant phonemaker has pledged to increase its presence in open smartphone platforms like Android and Symbian. For now, though, it argues that its own OS is better optimized, especially on midrange handsets, for mobile apps, and will attract a large number of programmers with its well established tools and Samsung's industrial design skills and burgeoning market share.

Samsung says it will stimulate developer interest with cash prizes and programmer events in Seoul, London and San Francisco over the coming months. It aims to put itself in the forefront of touchscreen phones, for the mass market and emerging economies as well as the high end, with bada, and said the "touch interface was becoming the main focus of the mobile strategy". It supports Samsung's TouchWiz UI, which also runs on other OSs, and bada provides its supporters with flash control, web control, motion sensing, vibration control and face detection tools, plus context-aware applications incorporating accelerometers, tilt, weather, proximity and activity sensors. Bada apps can integrate with handset functions and service applications also can share information such as personal profiles, social relations, schedules or content.

The SDK features an integrated development environment based on the Eclipse C/C++ development tools, with sample applications, documentation and tutorials. The new bada developers' web portal also promises tutorials and API reference documentation as well as forums.

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