ReadWriteWeb

Samsung recently announced it expects to sell around 5 million bada-powered handsets by the end of 2010 and that the total number of application downloads in Samsung's app store is expected to surpass 50 million by December. That's an impressive start for a mobile operating system that was only publicly revealed a year ago, where the first bada phone, the Samsung Wave, didn't ship until June, and where the Wave was the only bada phone available until October when additional models were launched.

To put this in perspective, Samsung has been shipping more Wave phones in the past few months since its launch than any other smartphone manufacturer except for Apple with the iPhone. But does that mean developers should now be paying attention to bada?

Google and Samsung may be announcing a "Nexus Two" smartphone at the mysterious press conference being held on November 8th in New York City. The conference will feature the launch of a "new Android device," which is now suspected to be the next Google experience phone, meaning a phone featuring the latest hardware and most current version of the Google mobile operating system Android. In this case, it's expected to be the first phone running "Gingerbread," the code name for Android 2.3.

Now, a new report is claiming that this won't be just any new Samsung Android phone, but the "Nexus Two," a follow-up to Googe's former flagship phone, the Nexus One.

The Android platform has garnered much attention lately because of its rapidly expanding number of apps and phones on the market, so additional growth statistics should come at no surprise. Mobile Web usage on Android devices in the U.S. quadrupled in the second quarter of 2010, stealing market share from Apple and BlackBerry devices, says U.K. mobile analytics firm Bango. Apple's traffic grew just 13% causing it's share of the mobile browsing market to fall 16%, and BlackBerry saw its similarly slow growth outpaced by Android devices.

Augmented reality (AR) has a long way to go before it achieves widespread acceptance and exposure to the public, but thankfully, many of the leading companies are continuing to make large strides towards this goal with commercialization of applications and the growing popularity of AR advertising. Earlier this month, metaio, one of leading vendors of AR software and services, updated its iPhone application junaio to version 2.0 in an effort to keep up with the growing AR browser market, but it is a truly useful implementation of AR in this app that will help the emerging technology reach more users.

Samsung is taking aggressive steps to reach deep into the enterprise with plans for a suite of mobile collaboration applications and partnerships with the likes of Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle and a host of others.

The collaborative tools including enterprise email, instant messaging security, mobile device management, unified communications, customer relationship management, salesforce automation and business intelligence.

Samsung is working with its channel partners to provide the applications. It's another form of bundling, really, providing options for what products an enterprise customer may want to include on devices for its employees.

Here in the U.S., your choices in phones running Google's new Android operating system have been limited. If you weren't a fan of the T-Mobile G1 form factor - a design best for heavy texters thanks to its slide-out keyboard - you were pretty much out of luck. No more. Word has it that Samsung will soon be releasing their own Android smartphone for use on both the T-Mobile and Sprint carriers.