Systena began shipping what appears to be the first new mobile device to run the Linux-based Tizen OS. Aimed at developers in Japan, the Systena tablet runs Tizen 2.1 on a quad-core, 1.4GHz Cortex-A9 system-on-chip, features a 10.1-inch (1920 x 1200) display, and offers 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage.
Is anyone here using Tizen? Is there even something you can run it on besides this tablet?
According to Wikipedia, Tizen runs on some Samsung cameras (NX2000 etc.) and the GT-i9500 prototype.
Samsung originally planned to ship a Tizen phone to end users earlier this year, but they delayed the launch indefinitely.
A few other phone makers are Tizen Association members, but they have nothing on sale either.
Intel, who are otherwise really desperate to get into mobile, preferred to produce the NUC instead of a device that runs Tizen.
Tizen set up an app challenge in July which ends in a few days. That you can only now buy a device for seeing your app in action is pretty pathetic.
https://www.tizen.org/blogs/bdub/2013/tizen-app-challenge-now-open
Here is what I personally don’t get…why? Why would you want this? What problem does it solve? What makes this worth giving up the millions of apps on Android?
The way I see it there really isn’t much you an do to make Android any more “open” as you an already root it, add a CLI, mod it how you want, so like Windows on ARM I really don’t see what this brings to the table that would make me as a retailer want to carry this over the bazillion Android tablets and phones.
Well, lets see if Tizen won’t join Maemo and Meego,
http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/10/samsung-slowing-tizen
You forgot Moblin and Bada…
and Windows CE and WP7.
According to you Tizen “is a winning strategy”
http://www.osnews.com/thread?555645
You need to know what you’re talking about or you end up like cdude.
Tizen is dead in the water and always has been. Samsung is not a software company.
Not to be outdone by Thom though:
http://www.osnews.com/story/26296/Samsung_effectively_kills_Tizen_B…
only to turn around and say it’s Samsung’s future.
http://www.osnews.com/story/26865/Samsung_s_future_is_Tizen_not_And…
Wow.
The Always Wrong Club strikes again.
Good strategy, miserable execution. If/When a usable release appears, makes it to devices and is shipped it could still gain significant share and, more important, be an option, a plan B.
For Samsung this is a required option since without plan B you fail when your plan A is doomed. See Nokia.
And since people like you need more hints to understand most simple context. The winning strategy citate is in refernce to following sentence: “Samsung has full control of there stack unlike with Android where Google has that control.”
Sure you not understood the context. Business as unusual.
More questions? Jusk ask. We will answer them too and enlight your weak minded view future. Be our guest 🙂
Edited 2013-10-28 02:19 UTC
I think I provided your quote in full context. It shouldn’t be a question even, Samsung is terrible at software. They do more acqui-hiring than Yahoo.
So from the onset anyone who thought Tizen had potential or was the future is crazy.
What’s hilarious about the both of you is the revisionist history to make it seem like you called it all along.
You’re not insightful, you’re not clever, and your analysis is never (and I mean never) on the mark. This should just serve as a warning to anyone thinking of taking your posts seriously.
To add to this, here’s Tomi Ahonen. The “influential” analyst that OSNewsians like to quote.
https://twitter.com/tomiahonen/status/210830804186697729?screen_name…
June 2012. Tizen coming”fast and strong”
https://twitter.com/tomiahonen/status/249290909684998144?screen_name…
Sept 2012. Tizen #2 by 2015
LOL. This is a circus and he’s your ring leader.
I may not agree with you Nelson on many issues but you certainly play the ball well.
I know there was an effort to port Tizen to Nexus devices, but I don’t know the current status of that project.
I had a chance to use this tablet at the Japan IT Week expo in Tokyo, a few days ago. Talk about sluggish and unintuitive. Couple of buttons that I wasn’t too sure what they did when I press them and then I couldn’t tap on any apps after that, I had to press the “settings” button again. I guess the button was to rearrange icons on the homescreen?
Then a tiny back button appearing at the bottom right, which when in a browser is a bit confusing, because it doesn’t bring back in the pages but brings back to the homescreen.
And the whole experience, on a quad-core Exynos, was sluggish. Note quite as sluggish as Ubuntu Touch on a Tegra 3, but nothing like Android or iOS on quad-core CPUs… Got frustrated and moved on to other booths lol
Given the string of delays, I can’t help but wonder if Samsung has abandoned the idea of Tizen as smartphone OS and is instead looking for other viable markets. I know the Tizen website mentions in-car infotainment (whatever that is).
It could also be just a backup plan for any scenario they might need an OS and not have a suitable one available. But it’s hard to think they plan to dethrone Android with such a lack of urgency.
Android is already picking up steam in the automotive infotainment sector ( infotainment means it is the primary interface for the stereo, navigation, heating, cooling, and many other car functions. There are other systems in place right now, but Android looks fairly attractive to many people in the space.
Tizen is part of Samsung’s risk management plan. It’s very unlikely that they would actually push it, but they keep it on simmer as a relatively cheap way to have a backup in case something catastrophic happened with Android (burdensome patent issues, Google pulling out, whatever). So they keep Tizen around with a couple hundred thousand a year investment as a backup plan that could be pushed into shape if necessary.
Even that doesn’t make sense, seeing as how Samsung could easily just decouple Android from Google and run their own ecosystem from it which is something they’d have to do with Tizen anyway.
I posted this in another forum back in August.
Here’s a list of members of the Tizen Association:
https://www.tizenassociation.org/members/
Now if people had just been paying attention to what I have been saying for years, a lot of these names would look familiar and would be expected. What’s the connection between these companies and why is one company not on the list? It’s simple to anyone who knows computer history.
Tizen appears to be the OSF of the 2010s. As in the joke that OSF meant “Oppose Sun Forever” back when everyone in the Unix world was afraid Sun was going to establish a hegemony. They should call Tizen OQF because its membership list appears to be a who’s who of “Oppose Qualcomm Forever.”
Here’s an easy example explaining the names:
http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/01/ntt-fujitsu-nec-new-platform-par…
“The fractious on-again, off-again love affair between NTT DoCoMo, Fujitsu and NEC has taken another turn. After dissolving a partnership to build a common LTE platform that included Samsung and Panasonic …”
What an AMAZING coincidence that ALL FIVE of NTT DoComo, Fujitsu, NEC, Samsung, and Panasonic are all members of the Tizen Association. And who’d have possibly guessed that Intel and Sprint from WiMAX and Huawei would be in an association of companies that have an interest in LTE solutions beyond Qualcomm’s? And the rumors are Verizon is looking into a gigantic buyout of Vodafone’s stake.
But why is SK Telecom there? Don’t they support CDMA and Qualcomm-chipset phones on their LTE network? Well, look at their Wikipedia article and what do we find:
“In August 2006, SK Telecom signed an MOU making it the first non-Chinese company to participate in the TD-SCDMA Project. Under the agreement SK Telecom will work with China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) on development of TD-SCDMA …”
If only there was an HTML5-based future phone system built around Qualcomm chips. Oh wait, there is one, the Mozilla phone.
As an update, NEC was on the Tizen Association Board of Directors as noted by:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizen
Edited 2013-10-27 06:56 UTC
and…that’s bad? good?
Qualcomm’s dominance worries me far more than Samsung’s.
There is a backdoor around Qualcomm’s dominance and that’s the tablet market where they’re less powerful. Become defacto in tablets and OEMs will naturally flirt with the idea of having a single chipset across their product offerings.
Its risky and time is running out though as Qualcomm is entering tablet chips this generation with very compelling Snapdragons.
Notice that nVidia isn’t on there either. Understandably they don’t want to have anything to do with an Samsung/Intel-led project…
Tizen is in case Samsung ends up upsetting Google by co-opting Android or the devices to the point where they upset the business relationship. Considering that Samsung has their hands in everything, especially displays and RAM (http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/Pages/US-Made-MotoXs-Cost-Com…) for Apple, Motorola, and Nokia, this is an insurance strategy.
I don’t see this happening anytime soon, however.
Samsung already has an Intel-based tablet running Android. They are big enough to be able to handle diversifying, esp. if Intel is able to score a few more wins for phones and tablets. I do not see them having to use this OS. After all, didn’t they just kill Bada?
If I was a device manufacturer looking to put out cheap devices, why would I bother with an unproven OS when I can get any number of OEM designs on the cheap from China that run Android or a similar OS? That cuts down my BOM and development costs significantly. Retailers will stock Android more than something they do not know.
The one player I see succeeding in this space, if they don’t screw it up, is Microsoft. They will own the Asha phones and the S40 OS. I want to see what they will do with them or if they will let them rot like so many of their other acquisitions.
It’s an excellent hobby/backup plan OS. However, there’s too large of an ecosystem out there with Android to ignore. Short of Google doing something to really upset a lot of companies, there’s no chance of seeing a Tizen device in Best Buy anytime soon.
That’s not to say they can’t get a niche market.
You can’t seriously believe that Microsoft is going to keep iterating on the current *Java-based* Asha platform after the takeover. IMHO there’s no chance in hell that MS is going to support development tools based on Java. There’s just too much history and bad blood associated with Java at MS, not to mention the never-ending Not Invented Here syndrome from which Microsoft suffers. If you want proof of this, just look at what happened when MS bought Danger (makers of the Sidekick), whose platform was incidentally also based on Java. MS started from scratch to create a whole new platform, the now-barely-remembered Kin, which was ultimately too underpowered and too late to make an impact and simultaneously managed to delay the development of Windows Phone 7 while they were at it.
To be honest, MS would be smartest to kill Asha. Otherwise they are wont to pull another Kin and try to develop a new platform no one wants from scratch *again*, which is really just a waste of everyone’s time and talent. The effort would be much better invested in making sure that Windows Phone runs well on the next generation of cheap phone hardware (which from what I’ve read it actually already does)…
Edited 2013-10-28 00:37 UTC
The only useful feature of Asha phones is great battery life. Within a year or two they will be abandoned as basic WP8 phones become sub $100 items.
Asha has a HTML (gross I know) platform in addition to JME. But I agree mostly, Microsoft will divest from Asha after a short while. If they’re smart they’ll license Exchange/Office to whoever their new owner is.
Using Asha as a stepping stone to the Microsoft stack is smart, but I doubt Microsoft can stomach investing in the platform. They’re so pigheaded they’ll waste time squeezing Windows into that price point and get there too late.
Also it’ll be interesting to see Asha sales in Q3 and Q4, if this breaks out into its own as a successful platform it’ll be harder to kill.
Nelson,
When I was in Paris last year, I noticed that you could not walk 100 feet in the Metro without running into an advertisement for the Asha phones or a store selling you one for 89-119 euro.
The fact that there is a phone platform out there with modern-ish features and great battery life that Microsoft now owns is a paradox. I want to see the Q3/Q4 to see how successful it is.
If it is as successful as I think it will be, then I see it being sold to someone who will actually do something with it (maybe even a Finland gov-sponsored entity). Otherwise, I expect it to be killed, either by incompetent management like the Kin/Danger, neglect, or just arrogance.
BTW, when Intel gets up to speed on tablet chipsets, NVidia is going to have to watch out. So will Qualcomm. Intel and Samsung have complementary technologies in that space. Who else makes competitive LTE chipsets (and I don’t mean Broadcom – that company is toxic)?
You can now buy very capable unlocked dual core (even quad core) Android phones for less than those prices.
Exactly. In comparison to commodity Android phones the Asha phones are practically a joke, both in terms of hardware and software… And I don’t see how all the advertising in the world will make up for the fact that the touch iteration of the Asha OS is essentially a brand new platform with de facto no app ecosystem…
To be fair, it was windows phone 7 that delayed kin, not the other way around. Kin was ultimately based on Windows Mobile 6 because they got sick of waiting. But, yeah the larger point stands MS took a pioneer in the mobile space and killed it due to their insistence that everything be MS. It really makes no sense. The brains of Danger left before (Andy Rubin aka founder of Android), or right after ( Matias Duarte Head of UI at Android).