Samsung was all about the bada and Wave at this year’s Mobile World Congress (actually they had some other products, but the main focus was on the new platform and the first device that runs it), so it doesn’t come as a surprise to learn they plan to move 10 million Wave units this year. Moreover, the goal is to have thousand apps in the same period.
Let’s see whether that’s likely to happen. First, we know that the Wave will be available in 50 countries by May, giving Koreans about 8 months to reach the goal. Samsung is the second largest handset maker so they may actually be able to pull this off. On the other hand, Wave is the premium device and we can’t really compare the Star, F480 or Cookie numbers. We don’t know the Jet S8000 (more comparable device) figures, which could be useful as a benchmark.
As for the number of apps, that’s another story… or is it. The SDK will be available next month and from then on, it’s all about the marketing, organizing events for developers and spreading some love among developers to entice them to hop over to platform. To date, Samsung was not that successful in getting developers on board, so it’s a tricky question, after all. For one thing, they would need to be more friendly to bloggers — i.e. we are quite a large website and we almost NEVER get loan Samsung devices directly from the company – it’s usually the carriers that give us their phones to review.
Samsung obviously has ambitious plans with bada and Wave, but will they be able to reach the targets set is a different story. They need to be super aggressive to engage bloggers and influential Twitter users in order to find their way to early adopters’ hearts and minds which at the moment are all about Android.
[Via: SamsungHub]