Smartphone was, is and always will be one of the most useless phrases this industry has ever invented – and we’ve made up a few.

God help us. At first, it existed to differentiate handsets with email, video, MP3, document reading and other ‘advanced’ functions from dumb feature phones. But when big selling feature phones like the Tocco easily embraced the sophisticated stuff, the only differentiator became the third party OS. Since when does the average punter care about that?

The blurring of the lines appears to have underpinned the thinking behind Samsung’s Bada platform/OS, which launched last month. Through many long speeches the firm rammed this idea home. Shame, then, that it did so by calling Bada a ‘smartphone platform for everyone’, rather than eradicating the ‘S’ word for good.

Ho hum.

So what is Bada? Well, in Samsung’s words it’s a ‘feature-rich platform that delivers enhanced mobile experiences for consumers, and a support programme for developers’. Translated, it seems to be a new proprietary OS and UI that will run across every touch-enabled phone shipped by Samsung next year.

Given that the firm sold 40 million touchscreens in 2009, and will surely sell more in 2010, that could make Bada a serious rival to Android, Symbian, Windows Phone and iPhone within 12 months. Handets will start shipping with the OS during the first half of next year to 50 countries.

Developers will be able to program in C++ for Bada handsets and will get deep access to hardware capabilities such as GPS, contacts and camera. There will also be APIs for in-app purchasing, face recognition, multipoint touch and Flash support. This is an improvement on the current feature phone options, which support only Java or Brew. Bada apps will eventually be able to stream video, which was the main focus of the most interesting of the presentations by Samsung’s publisher partner, Blockbuster. It intends to use Bada in  a flagship application for streaming, renting and previewing films as part of a multi-channel offer.

It’s a bold move by Samsung, which is clearly throwing its whole weight behind this ‘every phone is a smartphone’ philosophy. This has been rumbling for a while – certainly since October when the firm flew hundreds of partners and press to Milan for a lavish launch of the Corby/Genio range – a handset series that packed advanced features into a fashion-centric form factor.

So, what does Bada mean for Samsung’s commitment to Symbian, Android and the rest? Well, the firm has denied it’s pulling out of any of them. But it’s hard to imagine any further support for the fading Symbian option, while the appearance of just one Android device to date (the Galaxy) suggests the Google OS is hardly front of mind either.

This was far from the only question that went unanswered. Although Samsung stressed that Bada apps will be downloadable from the recently-launched app store, it wouldn’t be drawn on a rev share.

Samsung’s sheer market power – the world’s second biggest OEM – means that Bada can’t be ignored, but it’s more fragmentation in a mobile platform family that already includes Android, Symbian, Linux, Windows Mobile, Java and BREW.