As a joint venture between Intel, Samsung and a number of other tech companies, the Tizen open-source mobile operating system is an interesting beast. Having risen from the ashes of Samsung’s Bada and Intel’s Meego OS’s, Tizen is the culmination of what these companies have been trying to accomplish for years now, and might finally be closer to reality than ever before. Tizen has seen a rush of companies supporting it lately, and was even said that it will coexist with Android instead of trying to replace it on Samsung’s flagship devices. All of this has been heresay so far though, as neither Samsung or Intel have produced a device that has actually run the OS for public consumption yet, and just about this time last year we were wondering if 2013 would be the first year we’d see an actual Tizen device launch to market. At this point it’s unclear what the first device will be, whether it’s Samsung’s own SC-03F or not, it appears we’ve got one more phone running the new OS; the ZTE Geek, and it’ll make an official appearance at Mobile World Congress just next month.
You may not have heard of the ZTE Geek before, but you’ve seen it pictured above. The ZTE Geek was the world’s first Tegra 4-powered device and was one of ZTE’s flagship devices in 2013. Samsung and Intel have apparently chosen this one to be the first big phone to show off Tizen on, and we’ve only got about a month to see it in action since MWC starts on February 24th. This is a particularly interesting device to use since Tizen was previously aimed at lower-end devices and not designed initially as a flagship device seller. The ZTE Geek features a 1080p display, 2GB of RAM and all the horsepower the Tegra 4 chip can give you. For reference Nvidia’s own portable gaming system, the Nvidia Shield, is powered by the Tegra 4 chipset, and outputs some pretty incredible graphics for any mobile platform. Power efficiency has never been Tegra’s strong suit though, so it’ll be interesting to see how well Tizen fares with such a chip, since Tizen is supposed to be a pretty low memory footprint OS. We know we’ll only be seeing a Tizen-powered ZTE Geek outside of the US though, as Samsung has said they won’t be bringing Tizen to the U.S. any time soon.
Source: Tizen Website