Samsung is still working on Tizen, and we’re actually going to get our first look at Tizen OS when the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo start shipping out. Tizen is Samsung’s baby. many of us thought that Samsung would drop Android in favor of Tizen, but after recent news, it doesn’t look to be the case. However, The Tizen Association announced 15 new partners in Barcelona today. That includes notables like Softbank, Sprint, Baidu and ZTE. But there is still no smartphone running the OS, they are still only showing reference devices.
“I’ve heard twice that Tizen is dead”, said Roy Sugimura, Tizen Association Chairman, and executive of NTT DoCoMo. “Tizen isn’t dead.” Indeed its not. As Samsung, just last night, announced two smartwatches running on Tizen OS. Tizen is one of several new mobile operating systems which are trying to gain some ground, and they’ve got some good backing with major manufacturers including Samsung and Intel.
Tizen has been going pretty slow lately. It was originally scheduled to show off its first smartphone late last year, and well we still haven’t seen one. It’s been delayed once again. NTT DoCoMo was supposed to be one of the first carriers to sell a Tizen phone, however the Japanese carrier has backed away from those plans, which is probably not a good sign for Tizen.
However, Tizen is going to make it out into the world in a month or two when the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo make it into stores and retailers. Since those both run on Tizen. Many of you may not have known this, but there is actually a camera sold in South Korea that is running on Tizen. And I wonder who made that camera? Yep, you guessed right, it was Samsung.
The Tizen Association also took time at the event to award developers with more than $4 million in prize money for both Tizen native apps and HTML5 apps. So they are working really hard at getting apps and such available for Tizen when it finally hits mainstream, instead of following in Windows Phone footsteps with a poor app-ecosystem.