What's new in bada 2.0?

At MWC 2011 in Barcelona (see earlier post), we announced bada in the version 2.0. Here is more info about what's new in bada 2.0

The most exciting new feature in bada 2.0 is that we are going to support multitasking. It is not yet quite certain how this will turn out eventually. You know multitasking is always some sort of tradeoff between allowing the flexibility to have several apps running (and potentially calculating heavy stuff) at the same time in the background versus performance impacts. Bottom line is, we want to have bada a "performing" mobile platform. So, we will introduce some mechanism that will prevent a further bada app from starting if not enough system resources are available. We are also thinking about having different categories of apps that are enjoying different priorities. We will update you as soon as we know more.

Next big thing is support of Near Field Communication (NFC). NFC has been around for quite a while -- quite a long while. It always seemed to be a chicken-and-egg problem. Service providers argued that there are no handsets out there supporting NFC, while handset manufacturers argued that there are no services. Hence, deadlock. Now, Samsung (and others too) make this step and integrate NFC hardware. bada does it too. Very nice.

We also worked on providing further possibilities of enriching the user experience. bada 2.0 will support speech-to-text (STT) and text-to-speech (TTS) conversion. We will also provide API access to OpenAL libraries, that is 3D sound. With this you can programmatically define the source of sound in a 3D manner. For those of you who came to our bada stand or developer day at MWC could have enjoyed one of our OpenAL demos. Support for both STT/TTS and OpenAL will help to increase the usage scenarios for apps.

In bada 1.x we provide the app control which you can use to invoke other apps out of a bada app. We extended this idea in 2.0. It will be possible to associate a bada app with content based on MIME types or URIs. That means that an app can be registered to be invoked to consume a particular type of content -- say an mp3. If a user wants to consume content, e.g. an mp3 file to stick with our example, the app registered with this type of content is invoked. If there are several apps registered, then the user gets a list to choose from.

If you are a passionate web developer, bada has now also more for you. In 2.0 we will support the JavaScriptframework, HTML5and over 80 APIs from the WAC 2.0 standard. All you will need to do is download the new IDE which has a project creation wizard that stepwise guides you through and upon completion creates all the bada app skeleton you need. You only need to do your web development stuff using JavaScript. We will reveal details about what exactly is supported soon.

Among other smaller additional features, we integrated an API that allows you to set up WiFi networks not only in infrastructure mode but also in ad hoc mode. With this you can establish local WiFi P2P networks out of the SDK literally with no effort.

We also worked on the tools. We will add tools such as code coverage, or performance analyser and we worked on performance improvement on some of the existing tools.

In terms of monetizing we keep on improving the functionalities to integrate advertisements into your apps and constantly work on expanding our partner network for operator billing.

Trust us, we are working hard on this version 2 of bada. We hope to get the first beta version of the SDK out by end of H1/2011. It is a tough call with a tight schedule. So, we know in your endless courtesy you will forgive us -- even if we deliver a bit later, right? :)

For more details check developer.bada.com