As promised, Samsung have unveiled their new smartphone platform, bada, and SlashGear were at the London event this morning. It’s important to note that bada seems at a relatively early stage; the first handset running the platform won’t go on sale until sometime in the first half of 2010, and Samsung didn’t have any prototype phones for us to look at. They did, however, outline some of their thinking behind bada, and show a demo video of the conceptual UI which you can see after the cut.

Video demo after the cut

bada is intended, says Samsung, to bridge the gap between current feature-phones and smartphones, with a range of devices spanning multiple price points and specifications that would all be able to access the same application store. Certain key features would be consistent across all devices – 3G and WiFi connectivity, GPS and a motion sensor, WQVGA or WVGA displays and multitouch-support, and the first bada device will debut the TouchWiz 3.0 UI – giving developers a potentially huge market audience for their applications. The bada application store will launch with fifty countries supported initially, but Samsung intend to spread it worldwide; users will not have to register in order to use the store, and Samsung hope to add both credit card and mobile billing options for payment.

Samsung will have an open SDK available and developers will be able to use various methods to get their applications up and running. bada supports C++ together with web runtime widgets and Flash, and Samsung will be running various developer days where coders can work alongside the company’s own software engineers. There’s already a great deal of developer support; Samsung brought Twitter, Capcom, EA Mobile, Gameloft and Blockbuster on stage with them, who are all planning bada applications, but Facebook, Konami and many others were named on the company’s presentation slides.

As further incentive, Samsung are going along a similar route to Google and others and launching the bada Developer Challenge, which has a $2.7m prize fund to be shared among authors of new applications for the platform. Obviously gaming will figure strongly in the first wave of releases – Samsung showed Resident Evil running in their concept, as an example of the devices’ potential, and Gameloft’s CEO went so far as to describe bada phones as “a full gaming platform” – but Blockbuster suggested the smartphone would become your “uber-remote” and allow for Video-on-Demand (VoD) to be downloaded to an HDTV and then the viewing picked up on your bada phone. EA Mobile’s vice president briefly outlined the potential for bada games to take advantage of the handset’s camera, mapping and social networking capabilities, thanks to Samsung’s APIs.

So far so good, but what’s less clear is Samsung’s strategy in bringing bada to market. We’d argue their point that smartphones have a price barrier keeping general feature-phone buyers away is untrue; there are several entry-level smartphone devices from various manufacturers, especially when you take into account carrier subscription. When asked why the company chose to launch a new OS rather than take advantage of something like Android or Symbian, the EVP of Samsung’s media solution center, Hosoo Lee, suggested that bada is easier to use, cheaper and has the potential to scale globally. Since Google are giving away Android, and it – and other platforms – have been adopted in devices pretty much across the globe, we’d argue that’s not quite true.

It was also difficult to get a straight answer on what exactly bada consists of, the presumption being that it’s Samsung’s proprietary OS with new, open APIs and a more accessible SDK. There’s a sense that Samsung have pushed forward with bada to a large part to maintain control of their platform, while simultaneously being able to sell it as “open”. Nor was there a definitive answer to whether the bada runtime could be downloaded and installed to existing Samsung devices, thus broadening its footprint and giving owners access to the new applications. The only real indication of bada’s technical capacity was a briefly shown slide – which you can see in the gallery below – including such things as OpenGL ES support, face recognition and direct graphics buffer access, but Samsung seemed reluctant to dwell on any hardware details beyond repeating that the first bada device would be one of many on the market by the end of 2010.

We’re also very aware that, while the regular SlashGear readers and geeks among us might question the need for a new smartphone platform, the bulk of Samsung’s sales are likely to be to non-tech-aware users. In that sense, sheer scale of numbers will probably see bada grab market share, even if consumers are buying the devices for their aesthetics, blunt camera megapixels or merely brand-recognition. bada’s application portfolio, therefore, may be a second-sell after the initial contract is signed, with Samsung having to educate new users as to why their device is now smarter than the feature phone they might have had before. It’s hard to pass judgement either way until we see a production device (or even just a prototype); despite Samsung’s broad launch window, we wouldn’t be surprised to see something at Mobile World Congress in February next year.