I have just read a short interview with Gary Twohig, the Country Manager of Samsung Mobile Ireland. Among other highly interesting things, he said that, shortly after Samsung Wave S8500 (the first product to include Samsung App Store) hits the markets world-wide, seven other (Bada?) devices, that include the app store, are going to follow this year alone. He furthermore talked about the commitment of Samsung to bring apps to the lower-price segment (aka a wider market), as opposed to a much smaller high-price segment dominated by the iPhone. What struck me most from that interview was, that this same year Samsung apparently is going to bring Bada devices to the prepaid market for a price as low as $99 (especially interesting for the young consumers)!!

Mr. Twohig also forecasted sales for 2010 of 115 Million Samsung mobile devices with pre-installed Samsung App Store. If you take into account that the Samsung App Store is installed of higher phones (smart-phones) and the following expectations of HMC Investment Securities regarding future of Samsung’s smartphone portfolio (we published this last November):

Prediction of Mobile OS on Samsung phones

then we could roughly estimate that Bada App market could reach beyond 20 Million users in 2010 alone. Another reason for me, as a mobile developer, to pay high attention to Bada as a whole. This is the kind of things which make my pirate heart beat faster! Arrrrr!

Another interesting thing I have encountered today is this short video about the Wave’s “Super AMOLED” Screen:

Finally, it seems that there is a Bada Developers Day in Italy this Thursday. This theoretically means that the developers should get the SDK and IDE till then. The absurdity of such an event without the corresponding development tools would be colossal to say the least. Nevertheless, we did think along the same lines back before the MWC2010, and look where we are today

There are a bunch of other factors that indicate that the release will happen this week though. Let us just sit and see what happens!

(Read the full interview with Gary Twohig here)

Related posts:

1. Samsung to ship 10 million Waves in 2010
2. Samsung to ship over 100 million touch screen phones in 2010
3. 1 Billion smartphone app users by 2013