This week Samsung announced its new mobile "platform," bada, which looks like a key piece in the company's "smartphones for everyone" strategy, the goal of which is convert millions of lower-end phone users to smartphone owners. What exactly defines a smartphone is an open question, but if you're Samsung, it seems to include an app store, as well as support for multitouch screens and a huge variety of sensors, including accelerometers, tilt, weather, proximity, and activity sensors. Also unclear is whether bada is an OS or something else; it's built on the Linux kernel and will use Samsung's proprietary user interface, already seen in its high-end "feature phones," like the Jet.

(In Korean, bada means ocean, and the marketing campaign plays off of that in rather predictable ways.)

Confusing things even further, Samsung will continue to produce phones running Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Linux Mobile. The introduction of bada points to the possibility of a lower tier of smartphones, with Samsung's highest-end devices still running one (or more) of these third-party operating systems. Backing that up are Samsung's statements that having a proprietary OS will make it cheaper to use, easier to market globally, and more customizable to the Samsung brand. (TechRadar has more on the platform and where it might fit into the mobile phone ecosystem.)

One thing that Samsung noticeably hasn't done is demonstrate any bada phones--not even a prototype. Instead, this week the company showed off sample applications in the bada development environment, which it released to partners on Tuesday, along with a software development kit. Samsung looks to be trying to jump-start the bada app store well before any phones appear; a fuzzy "first half of 2010" was the announced timeline for the first bada phones. The company already has development partner agreements with Twitter, Blockbuster, CAPCOM, EA Mobile, and Gameloft, and it's trying to make the platform attractive to independent developers with a bada Developer Challenge, a chance for them to win as much as $300,000 from a $2.7 million pool by creating new apps.

As cell phones become more like pocket computers, many people are calling for closer scrutiny of their security. Such people usually point out that today's phones are a lot like the desktop PCs of the mid-1990s. Attackers can apply a huge body of experience from attacking desktop machines when looking for a way into mobile devices.

However, some experts argue that mobile phones are actually simple enough to be vulnerable to attacks originally designed for embedded systems.

"The phone is a very stripped-down environment," says Benjamin Jun, vice president of technology at Cryptography Research, a security research company based in San Francisco, CA. "Which means that someone who's trying to attack the device generally has an easier time, because it's not as complicated as a desktop system."

To demonstrate this, Cryptography Research adapted a smartcard attack for use against today's smartphones.

About a decade ago, the company found that a technique called differential power analysis would allow an attacker to extract the cryptographic keys from a smartcard by analyzing its patterns of power consumption. As it turns out, Jun says, the same type of analysis will reveal the cryptographic keys that a phone uses to access a carrier's network or to secure data stored on the device. In contrast, such an attack would be hard to pull off on a more complicated device, simply because a laptop, for example, would run more programs at the same time and produce a lot more noise.

The smartcard attack called for the attacker to be in possession of the object, but, in adapting it for smartphones, the researchers found a way to do the same types of calculations based on leaked electromagnetic signals picked up with an antenna.

Jun believes attacks on mobile devices are particularly serious because these devices are being used to access high-value corporate data.

But the bad news has a flip side. Jun notes that, just as attackers have experience exploiting vulnerabilities on embedded systems, manufacturers have experience developing countermeasures. Because embedded systems have even more limited memory and processing power than today's mobile devices, he thinks these countermeasures would be relatively easy to translate to smartphones.

"The main question is whether protections can be done entirely in software or not," Jun says. Entirely software-based solutions would be cheapest to roll out, he notes. Hardware countermeasures, however, are readily available and have already been shipped in millions of smartcards.

Since last fall, T-mobile's G1 has been the only hardware running Android, Google's Linux-based operating system. But soon, we'll see a new set phones and even netbooks that showcase the capabilities of the open source OS. On Monday, Samsung unveiled a forthcoming Android phone, available in European countries in June. Next week, the another Android phone, the G2, will launch in Germany. And ComputerWorld reports that in the coming months, the Chinese company Skytone will release an Android netbook called the Alpha 680. The netbook will use a processor from ARM, a company known for supplying the majority of processorsfound in mobile phones. In fact, the Alpha 680 will use an ARM11 chip--the same one found in the iPhone.

While netbooks are less powerful than laptops, they are becoming increasingly popular as secondary machines that people use while traveling. Netbook keyboards and screens, while small compared to laptops, are significantly larger than those of smartphones, which makes it easier to browse the web and write for longer period of time using them.

Some experts believe that the Linux-based Android could pose a real threat to Windows XP, which runs on the majority of netbooks, and to the forthcoming Windows 7. For one thing, Google's operating system has no licensing fee, so Android netbooks can be less expensive than those running Windows. Additionally, Microsoft's operating systems, while modified for netbooks, were originally designed to run on more powerful machines whereas Android was built to run on devices with limited processing power. Android could perform better on netbooks in some cases, but it's still a work in progress. If there are bugs out of the box, people will likely opt for the familiarity of Windows.