There has been alot of speculation as to what Samsung intends to “own” in the long term. Speculation that came about as a result of Google’s Motorola aquisition with rumours flying around about a possible meego aquisition and earlier on about webOS aquisition from HP. Samsung vehemently denied both claims. Something came up later on, and that was an announcement that South Korea would be developing their own open source Operating System for use by local mobile phone companies. These could be Samsung or LG. It never ended there, there was this announcement that Samsung will opensource their Bada OS come 2012.
I think the urge to have more control over products and tackle the very many uncertainties that come with Android. You know the feeling that new Android phones have nothing new to offer if they have the same version of the OS and no different phone specs. I have seen many similar sentiments online. Plus the need to customize the OS for various functions like use on Tvs and other gadgets without limitations of the OS, only time will tell whether this is worth the while.
So there was this announcement by Tizen that they are working on a new Operating system called Tizen wich will be Linux based, developed by Intel and Samsung. Development though will be open and will support smartphones, tablets, smart tvs, netbooks and in-vehicle infotainment devices. The project will be hosted by the Linuz Foundation, and the dev will be completely open.
The Tizen application programming interfaces are based on HTML5 and other web standards, and we anticipate that the vast majority of Tizen application development will be based on these emerging standards. These APIs will cover various platform capabilities, such as messaging, multimedia, camera, network, and social media. For those who use native code in their applications, the Tizen SDK will include a native development kit. We will open the entire Tizen software stack, from the core OS up through the core applications and polished user interfaces.
We expect the first release of Tizen and its SDK in the first quarter of 2012.
We will post additional details about this project in the coming weeks, including the code, developer documentation, and more. We look forward to working with all of you to make Tizen a success!
What do you think of this move?
