Samsung expects minimum of 1,000 bada apps by end-2010 Tweet

Handset maker aiming to ship around 10 million of its flagship Wave phone.

Samsung this week predicted its bada application store will be able to offer a minimum of 1,000 apps by the end of 2010.

Samsung has already made its bada software developer kit (SDK) available to its partners, and plans to publicly release it in March.

The handset maker has been talking up its smartphone platform during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, in a bid to attract software vendors.

"bada has the potential to deliver huge volumes straight away because Samsung is now the world's number two handset maker," said Dr. Justin Hong, vice president of Samsung Mobile.

"We want to push feature phones into the mass market, and get feature phone users into smartphones."

Samsung this week unveiled its first bada device, Wave, which is due to launch in April. Hong said the handset will be available in 50 countries by May.

"Wave is the first bada phone, and subsequent mass-market phones will follow," said Hong.

A spokesman on Samsung's stand told Total Telecom that the company expects to ship somewhere in the region of 10 million Waves during 2010.

Hong said as more bada phones are rolled out, software developers will be able to use the SDK to manually select the range of handsets they want their apps to support.

"We plan to offer developer support in 20 countries," he added.

Although Samsung is putting a lot of effort into driving bada, Hong stressed that it is not diverting resources from competing handset platforms such as Android.

"bada is very important to Samsung but we're pursuing a multi-platform strategy. We are the number two handset developer globally and we have to provide different handsets in different markets, for different market segments," he said.

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