What's so bad about Samsung's Bada? Samsung has been showing its first Bada phone, able to download applications from Samsung's version of iTunes and nowhere else. But will Bada really challenge Apple and the iPhone? That's clearly what Samsung has in mind - Bada is a closed platform owned and controlled by Samsung, and Bada applications have to be approved by …
Another company trying to lock us into their hardware and crappy OS.
Samsung have the WORST user experience of all phones and now they expect us to buy one because it does Twitter?
I think not.
I seem to remember Vodafone was doing a similar thing with 360, but that seems to have dies too.
If trhey should have learned anything from Apple, it is that closed app sores turn people off. At least they turn me off.
Also, I don't want all my contact system being agregated; access to them, yes, but not agregated. Eggs, meet single basket ... on the end of a rope dangling over a cliff.
Also, Samsung engineers aren't all they're cracked up to be. What kind of stupid programmer was responsible for the i8510 PC software, I haven't a clue. I generally put all my data on a separate parition, so that when Windows needs a rebuild, I can just twat the one partition, but Samsung hard coded the backup directory as being in teh documentsandsettings\username\applicationdata ... which is outside the easily moved, "My Documents" folder. Backing up 8gig of phone data had a serious impact on my OS partition.
Not that I'm runnign Windows any more, and when I actually did install the software on another machine to check for software updates the stupid thing tild me that my phone was out of date even though it was only a year old.
Nah, Samsung can go whistle Dixie with this offering. Who do they think they are .. Apple?
"If trhey should have learned anything from Apple, it is that closed app sores turn people off. At least they turn me off."
A couple of days past Apple's App Store's first birthday (June of last year), 1.5 BILLION apps had been downloaded - in January, 2010 the figure was over 3 billion.
I'm not saying Apple's policy is a good one, but on these figures I wouldn't say that many punters are being put off.
Ahhh.... but think of what they could be if they didn't. Um, that if they didn't do what they did, what they didn't do, would have done.
Well, I'm one that didn't do the do with Apple and I won't with Samsung either.
It is easy to quote the figures that did, but not the ones that didn't; or would have done if they didn't do what they did. Also, what about the apps that did when they could, but now can't?
If I buy a piece of equipment, it is up to me what I put on it. Provide me with a reset function, cool, but don't darm well dicate what I can and can't do with a piece of equipment I shelled out good money for ... even if I am shelling it out on a monthly basis for the next two years.
Not that I did ... you understand.
Re: Ah
Sure, I could readily appreciate the reasons (after all there are a few) why you might find the Apple’s Store unappealing – and I felt you made your reasoning clearly - but why I included those figures is that I really feel for a lot of people this simply isn’t an issue.
The history of commercial tech. products is strewn by examples of consumers going for something that won a marketing war or is just pretty hip, over something that’s superior.
In terms of the apps on Apple’s store and what might have been, most research points that people will install software on their iPhone, play around for it and then pretty much stop using it, regardless if it was a few app or not – anecdotally, I’d say this is pretty much true. I don’t see Apple as having a more open store policy would have dramatically increased sales:
a) Because punters have plenty to download and are downloading already; for the average consumer, there aren’t really any killer apps they’re crying out for.
b) The type of consumer who is put off by Apple’s Store policy and/or the kind of apps that are being prevented from being on the store are put off by the locked-in hardware.
I think it’s nice to think that if the hardware/software was less restrictive, there would be lots more sales… but let’s face it, the vast majority of punters know little about this and if they do, don’t really care.
I agree, many people aren't going to use many of the apps they download beyond an initial tittilation.
However, Apple got away with these figures because they were the first at it. I can't see Samsung achieving anywhere near Apples figures because most of the people who would do this, have likely already got the iPhone and had their fill of app titilation.
I believe that some of the developers have been badly bitten, however. I can't believe the Apple dev community aren't aware of Apple's fickle nature and I can't see them wanting to enter another market place with Samsung where the exact same rules may or may not apply, depending on how the company feels at the time. The company should be as bound to the rules they create as the devs are who sign up. Even if the customers are blind to what is going on, the devs certainly aren't so I can't see teh Samsung store being as bold and creating the same throughput.
I've had ... oh, my last seven or eight phones have been Samsung and although for the most part the phones themselves have served me well, (one clamshell survived being run over by a building site fork truck; the big wheeled jobbies) the supporting software has been lousy; in the case of Linux non existant and further when it comes to porting data from one phone to the other, I have usually had to manually type things in. The D600 software wouldn't recognise the i8510, and the i8510 software wouldn't recognise the D600. I could use the D600 software to back up the D600 phone data, but I couldn't import it in to the i8510 software to blow it down to the I8510. What a pain.
This is how it has been from phone to phone; except in the days when everthing was kept in the SIM ... so after what must be a decade of using Samsung equipment, software and their customer support, my faith in them actually producing a good product is fairly high, but in producing a service behind that product ... I'm not so sure.
Apologies, the last few phones were a single screen mono -> dual screen colour -> S300 -> D500 -> D600 -> U700 -> i8510 and the upgrade between them all was an unnecessary pain, as was the support.
The U700 even came with a demo game that I wasn't able to actually buy for months, and even when I did it had a critical bug and the developer didn't come back to me and Samsung didn't care. You try and get an e-mail address for those people; it is either a phone number which I'm almost sure is a 50p per min support number, (it doesn't clearly state anywhere what the charges are) or suffer.
However, I am considering the S5600 against the Nokia X6 for my choice of upgrade next week. I stuck with Samsung for so long because of the handsets; the company is lousy and I suspect the rest of the handset manufacturers are equally deaf/unreachable.
As for if the hardware/software was more restrictive ... yeh, Apple would have had another sale right here. I'd have gone for Chase Jarvis' photography app as well; I use my camera phone quite heavily 'cause it is the one I've always got with me. I'd have loved to have gone for the iPhone if it wasn't for the uncertainty of what they might do to it.
I can't tell how many others feel like me about it, though. That is a number we might never learn.
Re documentsandsettings\username\applicationdata (with one or more spaces I suppose): I like your system, my current thinking is to have a separate partition -first- for pagefile.sys since the guy who does MyDefrag (4.2.9) reckons that the start of the disk is fastest. Is 4000 MB too large, it's not as though disk is expensive nowadays but there are penalties... light dawns, have 2 or more pagefiles on the volume, pf1.sys, pf2.sys, pf3.sys, pf4.sys - the last one is physically closest to C, and you make Windows use that one first by... I dunno.
You -could- also make space there for your compressed image of C, unless you blast that straight to a Flash stick or removable media.
Anyway, on XP and presumably later you can mount a partition onto one or more empty folders on an NTFS partition. Specifically my C:\Progra~1\Hauppauge\DEC\record (for an ageing digital TV device) is actually the root of D: Not what you want to have to do for a bloody phone though...
And, Bill Ray! Sometimes reading the newspapers I have thought that exposing journalists' own private lives and pedalos would be fair play given what they reveal about others, but I hadn't thought of starting with you. Just in today's "Metro" there's a story about a quarry who has been seen adding friends on Facebook. They're watching!
Thank you for the explanation; I knew something like that was possible, but didn't delve in to it. I have to admit, to my technical shame, that I keep my OS partifion on FAT as it is easier to get to and fix if something goes West and won't boot.
I'm not sure if Linux has a writable NTFS driver yet ... someone probably does by now.
Although I've switched to Open Solaris for my servers (for ZFS) and Kubuntu for my desktops, I'll certainly remember that gem of mounting information.
Thank you once again!
While I don't like Samsung's gear all that much, I have to applaud the idea of building your own OS/App store. If only more companies would have the stones to forge their own path. Imagine a Sony OS, or a HP OS. Well, maybe those are bad examples, but as a previous commenter mentioned eggs and baskets, I have to ask: where's the benefit of building Android phones when the big G does a 180 and builds their own phone. Even MS is going it alone now, basically reducing handset makers to appliance builders in the vein of Dell and HP --heck, let's call it subjugation.
If the coalition for a standardised app store comes to fruition then maybe we'll see more companies developing their own OS. Before long, HTC and LG and Moto are going to discover the fallacy of relying on Adroid as a wave of cheap Chinese knock-offs will kill them off.
" If only more companies would have the stones to forge their own path"
Consider Nokia and the "Ovi" store that is doing a whole App store and more. Not only can you download apps, music, video etc.. but they offer online storage as well and other future possibilities.
I haven't used it so can't really comment, but it sounds like it should blow Apple and Android away.
And yet it's not even well known by most nokia users, probably because you don't have to have it to run the phone (unlike Apple and iTunes) and their marketing are focused on the phone hardware rather than the surrounding fluffy clod of software (and yes I do mean clod not cloud)
It sounds very interesting, but I fear no-one will develop for it. Palm's WebOS is, from what I've seen, a developer's dream (you'd expect nothing less from Palm), but their market share is so low that it's rarely worth developing for it.
The future is probably these cross-platform development environments like Appcelerator. If they could get iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Bada and WebOS all under one roof I'd be in heaven, and accept the inevitable flaws it will have.
I think what people might be forgetting is there are still incentives for developers on the closed platforms. Just because there may be a smaller userbase than iPhone users there's also less app competition.
What is better? A large chunk of a smaller userbase with bigger exposure, or a small chunk of a large userbase will less exposure?
Depends on the users of the phones, income, propensity to spend on apps, price point, and how good your app is against similar offerings etc. So there's more to consider than how many users?
P.s. I too own on iPhone, but I'm more excited about Android and it's possibilities to dev's and consumers alike!
What I like about your article:
- it gives us a lot of insights about the Bada APIs and the maturity/limitations of the platform
- you provide a good set of arguments for the need of more innovative APIs
Thanks much for these parts!
What is dislike about your article:
- You write: "But will Bada really challenge Apple and the iPhone?" I am really getting tired of these statements. Why does everyone assume that every mobile company in the world wants to challenge Apple? Yes, Samsung and Apple both produce mobile phones, but yet they address totally different markets! 90% of Samsung's 200m devices aren't smart phones. Bada certainly is NOT about trying to become the better iPhone, it is about providing an open application platform to feature phones.
- I find your article title pretty unfair and just attention catching. It's a platform in the very early stage and sure not everything is perfect yet. This was the case first with any other open platform...
Jo Ritter
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