Samsung bada Apps Store Crosses 100 Million Downloads

Samsung has announced that its bada Apps store has crossed 100 million downloads yesterday. This is within 10 months of the bada Apps store going live in June 2010. While this is far from Apple s App Store or Google s Market, it is still quite an achievement, certainly a lot better than Nokia s Ovi store.

Samsung currently offers 13,000 applications for its smartphones with bada OS and of all the countries, France, Germany and Spain account for 40% of the downloads made from the apps store. To celebrate the 100 million download milestone, Samsung has started a weekly prize draw for Wave owners. Any person downloading an application from the store is automatically entered to win different prizes including Samsung Galaxy Tab, Samsung Galaxy Player or USB sticks.
On a side note, if you are wondering how Apple continues to ignore that Samsung is using the name Apps store for its applications market, while it chose to sue Amazon for doing the same, the answer is that Samsung does not call it the Apps store, but rather chose to call it A-Store initially and now calls it the Applications Store.

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News: Samsung's bada Phone to be Shown at MWC

Samsung has confirmed that it will showcase its upcoming smartphone OS, the bada at the upcoming MWC later this month.

In a blog post on its bada blog, Samsung has revealed that the bada OS will feature the latest version of TouchWiz and that it would be very simple to use. We will also be seeing the first phones based on the bada OS at work at the MWC.  The first device based on the bada OS would be the bada S8200, which is set to sport a 3.7 AMOLED screen, HSPA, Wi-Fi, GPS, and a 5MP autofocus camera. It will also be powered by the now popular Qualcomm Snapdragon processor that powers the likes of the Nexus One and the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10.

As of now, we know that the bada-based S8200 will be priced at around $575 (Rs. 27,000 approx). What we do not know is whether the S8200 will be amongst the device shown at the MWC.
As for the bada OS, from the early screenshots of it at work, it does look contemporary and quite usable. The big question is how Samsung plans to position it amidst the likes of the Androids, the Windows Mobiles and the Symbians of the smartphone arena.

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