According to a report out of USA Today, who is a pretty reputable source, the Samsung Galaxy Gear 2 will be running on Samsung’s Tizen OS. That is their homegrown OS they’ve been working on for quite a while, and hasn’t really taken off, or even gone anywhere. This same report is stating that we’ll see the new Galaxy Gear 2, as well as an introduction to the Tizen OS at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next Monday. Which means Unpacked is shaping up to be quite the spectacle. Not only are we supposed to be seeing the Galaxy S5, Galaxy Tab 4, but now the Galaxy Gear 2 along with Tizen.
Obviously, this would be a pretty big change for Samsung. As the original Galaxy Gear does run on Android, and has even been rooted and ROMed. Samsung has even brought in developers from the likes of Evernote, Foursquare, Snapchat and more to develop apps for the Galaxy Gear. Obviously a switch to Tizen would mean Samsung needs to start over with their apps, unless they can do like Blackberry and have Android apps running on Tizen through a virtual machine. But even so, it wouldn’t be as smooth as just running Android on the Galaxy Gear. Then the other side of the coin here is, would the Galaxy Gear 2 running Tizen only work with Tizen-based smartphones and tablets? The issue there, is that there really aren’t any available right now.
However, there is a bright side to all of this. With Samsung running it on Tizen, that could mean that it would be a standalone device, similar to the Pebble. It would be nice for the Galaxy Gear 2 to be able to be used with devices that are not Samsung. That is one of the things that kept many of us out of buying the Galaxy Gear, because it was only compatible with the Galaxy Note 3, and Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition at launch.
Galaxy Gear running on Tizen. Would you buy one, if it were compatible with every Android device, and possible iOS devices as well? Let us know in the comments below.