Update – Samsung has issued a statement refuting the original DigiTimes article:
“Samsung is an initial member of Symbian Foundation and continues to cooperate with Symbian Foundation. At the same time, Samsung supports various existing open operating systems including Symbian, Linux, Android, and Windows Mobile. To provide more choices to meet consumers’ many different tastes and preferences, we will continue our ‘multi-OS’ strategy. Our policy is to provide what consumers want when they need.”
Samsung has announced its new open internal mobile OS initiative in Bada (Korean for ocean) and as a result will cease developing its current Symbian variant in order to focus on Windows Mobile, Android and Bada in 2010. Samsung was one of the few Asian manufacturers to support Symbian development outside of Nokia and actively licensed the early smartphone OS from the Finnish manufacturer for its own line of internally developed smart devices for sale in South Korea, which also featured other Samsung developments such as the TouchWiz user interface.
Samsung will officially launch Bada in December with a press event and beta SDK for interested developers.
