Samsung is serious about Tizen, already handing out developer devices
Samsung may be having quite a bit of success with their Android devices, but that doesn't mean that they are abandoning all other options. We've talked about Tizen, the OS that Samsung built out of MeeGo, before, and now it looks like Samsung is really serious about advancing their own open alternative to Android.
In the video above, you can see the first piece of developer hardware running Tizen. Despite being very much in the alpha stage, the software actually looks pretty smooth and appears to have some nice visual effects. It is clear, however, that Tizen has been heavily influenced by both TouchWiz'd Android and Samsung's own Bada, but it also has its own UI feel. All the apps are built in HTML5, so while there are of course very few at this point, should Tizen catch on the applications would be easy to develop and many existing HTML5 apps could work as well. Overall, the software looks fairly basic, but it does seem to work well and have quite a bit of polish for a alpha device.
It may be for developers, but the Tizen device's hardware is also fairly impressive. The 4.65-inch 1280 x 720 Super AMOLED HD display, 1.2GHz dual-core ARM Cortex A9, 1GB of RAM, and 8MP camera, are all on par with the current high end market. The "Tizen phone" also has WiFi, Bluetooth, and NFC connectivity, but no known carrier support as of yet.
As I have said, this hardware is far from being a consumer smartphone. Still, it is very impressive and somewhat unexpected. Samsung seems to have done quite a good job with their software, and if the can put out a device with the same kind of hardware that their Android devices have, then I think Tizen has a chance. It may be unlikely to catch on, but Tizen still looks like a very good product, and I hope that Samsung at least tries to bring a device to market.
[The Handheld Blog]
