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Unveiled in 2010, BADA from Samsung was designed to cost-effectively extend a new smartphone market to conventional feature phone users, giving them access to innovative features and applications like mobile VoIP.

Launched alongside the Samsung (News - Alert) Wave S8500 in April, 2010, BADA became an immediate hit among users and developers due to its ability to support a wide variety of applications, including social networking, commerce, gaming and media apps, as well as a number of location-based services.

The release of the Samsung Wave coincided with the launch of Samsung Apps, the Korean company's answer to Apple's (News - Alert) App Store. The online marketplace currently offers thousands of games, news, reference, social networking, navigation and other applications in more than 100 countries.

REVE Systems' mobile VoIP application, iTel Mobile Dialer Express, can run on any number of compatible mobile phone platforms, including BADA, Android (News - Alert), Blackberry, Symbian and Windows Mobile versions 5 & 6.

Support for mobile VoIP apps like iTel Mobile Dialer Express made the smartphone platform particularly attractive for users who want to save money by making mobile calls over all IP networks. Samsung sold more than 1 million BADA-powered Wave S8500 handsets in its first four weeks on the market.

The attraction for mobile VoIP app makers and other developers stems from Samsung's depth of technical support and its stable of developer tools. The BADA Development Site includes an SDK, an IDE and a host of other relevant information for app makers including video tutorials, blogs, sample code and multi-language forums. Premium support is also available for Samsung partners. Similar to other competing platforms, BADA enables developers to include in-app purchase options, advertisements and promotional tools. Developers keep 70 percent of all sales for their paid applications. Every app must be certified by Samsung before being launched in the app store.

New additions to the updated BADA 2.0 platform include multi-tasking, voice recognition, Wi-Fi Direct and NFC functionality for mobile payments. Still, millions of users continue to rely on BADA for its mobile VoIP support.