As we head towards Mobile World Congress and talks around the tech industry heat up as to what will be shown, little has been said about the next release of Samsung’s own smartphone platform – bada. The bada platform was announced at last years MWC event and since then has taken off into a big success around the world (except in the United States). However, with everything Samsung got right on the first Wave phone, they left a lot to be desired especially on what is supposed to be a “smart OS”. It lacked multitasking, had a limited number of apps, and the polish was not really there. Everyone saw the potential in bada and with it running on solid hardware, it was still a great option for those who wanted to be different.

Fast forward a year later, bada is now on six devices (Wave S8500, S8530, 525, 533, 575, and 733) with more phones set to be announce this year, Samsung sold over 5 million Wave devices in 2010, and bada 1.2 is now out. In terms of upgrades, bada 1.2 was a “maintenance” upgrade to those who have it and it fixed a lot of the issues people had in the past. People still wanted more and it seems like this year, a year after its launch, people will finally see the REAL bada platform shine at MWC 2011. Why do I say shine? It’s simple really, bada 2.0 is a MAJOR overhaul of the OS.

bada 2.0, in my opinion, is what bada should have been from the very start. When it first came out, some people were confused because Samsung labeled it as a smartphone OS yet, it did not do really many “smart” things. The release of bada 2.0 changes all of that. Finally, users will be able to enjoy multitasking (including 3rd party apps), better user interface and framework, smart home-screens, tons of new animations, PUSH notifications, speech recognition, NFC capabilities, Flash, HTML5, and more. On top of all of the improvements, Samsung is making tons of security improvements to make sure your data is safe. The changes to the OS is only half the story though.