“Already a bit of a legend in China, the 40-year-old serial entrepreneur announced last April that he had formed Smartisan Co., Ltd. to work on a smartphone OS, and that it would shame all manufacturers with its revolutionary user experience. Having missed the December target that he promised, Luo eventually took the stage in Beijing last week to spend well over three – yes, three – hours going through the thought process behind his Smartisan OS, so bear with us here.” The icons are nice, and there’s certainly some nice touches in there, but calling this an ‘operating system’ is stretching the definition beyond its breaking point.
Even though the alterations are not very deep, and some are questionable, it solves a fair number of “papercuts” – those tiny, easy-to-useto-dofix annoyances that are usually overlooked because there are things more important on the developers’to-do list.
The icons are nice, and there’s certainly some nice touches in there, but calling this an ‘operating system’ is stretching the definition beyond its breaking point.
Having read the article but not watched the video in its entirety, “distribution” seems like the appropriate word. There are more improvements and UI refinements between Smartisan OS and a clean Nexus Android install than there were between Ubuntu and Debian during the first four years. More recently, we can look at the refinements that elementary (http://elementaryos.org/journal/when-its-ready) adds to Gnome Shell, and they are branching out to their own distribution as well.
Some are less than impressed with SmartisanOS: http://www.techinasia.com/smartisan-os-chinas-war-apple-hype-train/