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Operating Systems Android Cellphones Linux

Could Tizen Be the Next Android? 243

MollsEisley writes: Right now, Tizen is still somewhat half-baked, which is why you shouldn't expect to see a high-end Tizen smartphone hit your local carrier for a while yet, but Samsung's priorities could change rapidly. If Tizen development speeds up a bit, the OS could become a stand-in for Android on entry-level and mid-range Samsung phones and eventually take over Samsung's entire smartphone (and tablet) lineup.
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Could Tizen Be the Next Android?

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @05:23AM (#48854783)

    Samsungs extensions on Android are bad enough - if they had an entire OS they controlled? Stuff that!

    • by gsslay ( 807818 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @06:25AM (#48854953)

      It'll be the usual story with Samsung;

      Hardware; neat!
      Software; Oh my god, what did your customers do to you to inflict this on them?

      • by GNious ( 953874 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @06:27AM (#48854957)

        As an owner of a Samsung BluRay player, I can confirm the Software part of the above statement.

        • Hm,

          I used to say exactly that. I owned a Galaxy S2 in the past and was convinced the above is true. But now after setting up my wife's nexus the S5 I bought for me is a pleasure. After all the crap google pulls just to force G+ down users throats (multiple sms anybody?, facebook pictures for contacts?, etc) the samsung extensions are a pleasure.

          • by CreatureComfort ( 741652 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @07:57AM (#48855197)
            I had an original Galaxy S. It was so bad, I swore I would never buy another piece of Samsung electronics again.

            Well, this time around, the only phone AT&T offered that met what I wanted was the Note 4, so I took a chance, with a heavy heart and much misgiving. I have to say, almost 4 months in, and I love this phone. Most of the stock apps are good enough that I'm using them rather than taking the chance on play store garbage. (Very unusual for me, I usually end up modding the hell out of my android phones) The Gear VR came in for Xmas,and is a great toy. I put in a 128Gb SD card and I have way more room than I need, even with a half dozen 3D full length movies on board. There is no lag or slow down on any of the games I have downloaded, and the screen is beautiful. WiFi and Bluetooth so far work flawlessly and fast. So far, all of the things that have frustrated me have turned out to be KitKat issues, not anything that Samsung has done.

            It's large, but I never wish it was any smaller, only that my hands were a bit bigger. It's still small enough to be pocketable, even inside an otterbox, and I never hold it up to my ear when I'm actually on a call (less than 5% of the time I'm using it anyway). With bluetooth in the car, as a headset, and speakerphone on my desk, I rarely have to take it out of my pocket or the car/desk holder to talk.

            It is good enough, that it just may entice me into getting Samsung when I get my 70" UHD TV later this year.
            • I had an original Galaxy S. It was so bad, I swore I would never buy another piece of Samsung electronics again.

              Agreed. Had the T-Mobile version and it was a shit phone. Even the custom mods couldn't make up for things like the broken GPS and lag even with trying all of the "no lag" fixes.

          • I installed Chameleon ROM on my S2, two years ago, it's a Samsung based ROM with the crap removed, it's the best ROM for S2 for sure,very stable, and with FM radio still working. Still working fine.
        • But not the hardware part? Not a ringing endorsement, huh.

    • You have to consider that the Samsung extras are the only thing they can really do to make their phones different, and so they have to create something almost by default. The problem is coming up with an idea for a thing that hasn't already been done by Google. (its like Microsoft in reverse, once a 3rd party came up with a great idea and Microsoft them bundled their own version in the next OS, Google bundles them before you have a chance!)

      So maybe if they are dedicated to an OS, they will have more of a re

  • A guess (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @05:25AM (#48854789)

    No, it can not. Android is already entrenched, and in a market where not even microsoft can dislodge it despite reasonable efforts Samsung can definitely forget about doing so.

    • Re:A guess (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @06:00AM (#48854885)

      Then again, Microsoft couldn't even dislodge Symbian.

      • Re:A guess (Score:4, Interesting)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @06:26AM (#48854955) Journal
        Symbian, particularly EKA2, was a very well designed system. It was let down by its slow adaptation to changing requirements. The userspace APIs were designed for a world where 4MB of RAM meant a high-end device. You suffered some difficulty programming because it was the only way to make sure things fitted in this little space. When 128MB started to mean a low-end device, this was a problem - the cost wasn't worth paying to be using 10% of the device's RAM instead of 15%. It wasn't helped by the in-fighting at Nokia that resulted in a load of different potential replacements.
        • Sounds somewhat like poor old classic PalmOS. Agile as hell on virtually no hardware at all; but increasingly lost and confused as capabilities expanded, and absolutely no logical room for growth, except perhaps as an emulator on something totally different.
          • Palm's issue, was that the "Pre" was to late to the smart phone market, by then, Apple was already with iPhone. When I had my Palm, and my cellphone, I kept wondering why the two were not melded. My wonderment lasted over two years.

            So if it was so difficult, why not break Palm OS to make it work on phones.

  • "Half Baked"? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Freshly Exhumed ( 105597 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @05:26AM (#48854791) Homepage

    Let's be clear that Tizen is actually the child of Nokia's and Intel's Linux-based OS that was known as Meego, which owed much of its existence to Nokia's Maemo Linux platform and Intel's Moblin. That's a lot of history, and Samsung has added more and more. Half-baked? What a bizarre term.

    • by Rhaban ( 987410 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @05:52AM (#48854857)

      Let's be clear that Tizen is actually the child of Nokia's and Intel's Linux-based OS that was known as Meego, which owed much of its existence to Nokia's Maemo Linux platform and Intel's Moblin. That's a lot of history, and Samsung has added more and more. Half-baked? What a bizarre term.

      overbaked?

    • by nonsequitor ( 893813 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @05:57AM (#48854867)

      Let's be clear that Tizen is actually the child of Nokia's and Intel's Linux-based OS that was known as Meego, which owed much of its existence to Nokia's Maemo Linux platform and Intel's Moblin. That's a lot of history, and Samsung has added more and more. Half-baked? What a bizarre term.

      I think it refers to the fact they must have been high to think it's a good idea.

    • Re:"Half Baked"? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jareth-0205 ( 525594 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @06:00AM (#48854883) Homepage

      Let's be clear that Tizen is actually the child of Nokia's and Intel's Linux-based OS that was known as Meego, which owed much of its existence to Nokia's Maemo Linux platform and Intel's Moblin. That's a lot of history, and Samsung has added more and more. Half-baked? What a bizarre term.

      "Been fiddled with for ages" doesn't really mean it's mature or ready. The fact is hasn't been on any significant number of devices in the real world would be a big flag, there's alot of refinement that comes from *actual* use in the wild that you don't get from lab development.

      • Re:"Half Baked"? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @07:05AM (#48855041)

        I still use Meego on my Nokia N9, best phone I've ever had, and still have (I also have a M8 One and iPhone 5S - I'm a mobile dev, I absolutely prefer Meego over iOS and Android).

        Meego is amazing, there's no denying it - I haven't taken a hands-on look at Tizen lately, but I can't imagine they've stuffed it up too much, and if they've managed to improve on Meego, well I'll be there in a heart beat, decent hardware permitting.

        • by jbolden ( 176878 )

          Tizen has the OS layer replaced. What you are looking for is Sailfish: https://jolla.com/ [jolla.com]

        • I can't imagine they've stuffed it up too much, and if they've managed to improve on Meego

          Have you used a Samsung-inflicted Android phone..? They have a knack for making things worse...

    • Re:"Half Baked"? (Score:5, Informative)

      by hitmark ( 640295 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @06:20AM (#48854935) Journal

      I was recently corrected on the connection between Meego and Tizen. Apparently Meego was abandoned fully upon the foundation of Tizen, and the only connection between the two was that Intel was involved with both (tough they seem to have since pulled out of Tizen).

      In essence the only remnant of Maemo/Meego is Sailfish, the continuation of Mer.

      • by caspy7 ( 117545 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @09:46AM (#48855807)

        In essence the only remnant of Maemo/Meego is Sailfish, the continuation of Mer.

        I feel like I need a Tolkienesque chart to keep up with this.

        • by Svartalf ( 2997 )

          That's because Chipzilla's involved with it. They've been flailing around with all sorts of crap, muddying up the whole picture with MeeGo, Tizen, now Edison and Tesla. They want to have it all for themselves. An admirable business notion, but unaccomplishable in the manners unto which they've been fucking things up with in this space.

      • by Svartalf ( 2997 )

        The only thing that's common between the two is the OS core...which has now drifted since Tizen's formation both on Sailfish and Tizen.

  • by Val314 ( 219766 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @05:28AM (#48854795)

    most likely the next Meego

    (Or if its more lucky the next Firefox OS or Ubuntu Phone)

    No Apps => Noone buys it

    • Re:Nope (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Stormwatch ( 703920 ) <(rodrigogirao) (at) (hotmail.com)> on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @06:00AM (#48854881) Homepage

      MeeGo actually had a chance... if only the M$ trojan hadn't entered Nokia!

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by short ( 66530 )

      No Apps => Noone buys it

      Tizen runs Android apps by ACL [openmobileww.com]; as I heard.

      • by Andy Dodd ( 701 )

        Most of those emulation layers have failed... While it's 95%+ compatible, that last 5% causes many people's apps to not work. Blackberry tried Android runtime compatibility and failed miserably.

    • Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Required Snark ( 1702878 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @06:57AM (#48855019)
      What other phone manufacturer would touch Tizen with a 10-foot pole? That would put them at a significant disadvantage because Samsung would never let them build a better product. So the only ones using will be Samsung, and somehow it doesn't seem likely that Samsung can create the same kind of walled garden that Apple has developed.

      It seems like Google is has no long term commitment to building phone hardware. They didn't keep Motorola, for example. And this attempt to make a modular phone seems more like a technology demonstration then a product role out. Does anyone think they will try and make a business line out of it? I doubt it. So hardware vendors can continue use Android and not be worried about competing with Google directly, which is why I think they got rid of Motorola.

      • by Rich0 ( 548339 )

        What other phone manufacturer would touch Tizen with a 10-foot pole? That would put them at a significant disadvantage because Samsung would never let them build a better product. So the only ones using will be Samsung, and somehow it doesn't seem likely that Samsung can create the same kind of walled garden that Apple has developed.

        It seems like Google is has no long term commitment to building phone hardware. They didn't keep Motorola, for example. And this attempt to make a modular phone seems more like a technology demonstration then a product role out. Does anyone think they will try and make a business line out of it? I doubt it. So hardware vendors can continue use Android and not be worried about competing with Google directly, which is why I think they got rid of Motorola.

        I think this is a big part of what is making Android so successful. It used to be part of what made MS successful, but in recent years MS has been trying to become more like Apple, and thus everybody is running (if I only had $100 everytime Adobe sells a copy of photoshop, maybe we should be the exclusive hardware provider for some new OS, etc).

        People like to decry the generic model but it is a BIG reason for why PCs took off. It works best when you don't have too much vertical ownership of the whole chai

    • No one has really managed to provide competition to the iTunes ecosystem (I consider the iOS App Store as part of this ecosystem) or Google's Play ecosystem.

      Samsung has tried multiple times to begin establishing their own ecosystem, and those attempts have consistently failed. In many cases (myself included), those attempts drove people away from Samsung's products. (The most annoying thing I remember about Touchwizz was the constant bombardment of "register for Samsung blah" shit - you couldn't disable t

  • by aibot.slashdot ( 3988817 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @05:39AM (#48854827)
    It will be just an other obscure mobile OS - But If Samsung actually start to manufacture Tizen devices over Android. They will loose the market just like NOKIA did a few years before.
    • Apart from Apple zealots people don't care what OS runs their smartphones so long as it looks nice - which is where Windows phone falls off a cliff.

    • by Rei ( 128717 )

      It will be just an other obscure mobile OS - But If Samsung actually start to manufacture Tizen devices over Android. They will loose the market just like NOKIA did a few years before.

      Ahem. [loseloose.com]

  • by obarthelemy ( 160321 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @05:51AM (#48854851)

    (apart from Samsung's need for pressure points vs Google ?)

    Tizen needs a unique selling point. Being "a Mobile OS that works" isn't one, that need has been met years ago, and nobody wants Yet Another Smartphone OS for the sake of it.Maybe there's a need at the extreme low-end, next to Microsoft's Asha line (not a resounding success), and a tad below Android One. Maybe Security could be a selling point (except it doesn't seem to be doing much for Blackberry). Maybe there's a fringe of teach-heads who deem Tizen more linux-y than Android and keep agitating about it for that reason (not a big market).
    As it stands, the most unfulfilled need I see is the carriers' desire to take back control of our phones, and I'd rather that one stay unfulfilled.

    • It would be like TinyBASIC or MicroVMS. A temporary solution to take advantage of cheap hardware but a year down the track, good hardware would be cheap enough to run the real thing.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Why should Tizen be more suitable for low-end devices? It seems to me like an OS with the same functionalities as Android or iOS.
  • Porting (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gmuslera ( 3436 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @05:59AM (#48854873) Homepage Journal

    If they want to have a chance, they must not have just bundled with a few new phones. It should have good enough ports for other samsung devices (even done officially by samsung) and open enough devices from other major manufacturers. They need to build a critical mass of actual users and a community behind it. And need to be very open. If they want (or must do, if done by another company) may keep some key part (i.e. optional android compatibility app/libraries) as what they sell or license of it and is not fully open source, but the rest should be.

    Meego/Maemo failed mostly because it was available mostly on one particular device from one particular manufacturer. They could learn the lesson this time.

    • Meego/Maemo failed mostly because it was available mostly on one particular device from one particular manufacturer.

      And that manufacturer's CEO had sabotaged that device in every way he could, such as not having it released in most relevant markets, and publicly stating that no other MeeGo device would be made, no matter how well-received it happened to be (reviews at the time were very positive, but always with the caveat that MeeGo was a "dead man walking" system).

      There is no doubt in my mind that Stephen Elop is one of the nastiest white-collar criminals ever. Everything he did was to serve Microsoft's interests, with

  • Well... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @06:01AM (#48854887) Journal
    It's hard to be optimistic about the fate of a competitor starting from behind(and with Samsung, not exactly a bastion of taste, UI/UX expertise, or other software virtues, as the most visible player) and up against Android(which arguably has some seriously fucked design problems, but is actively being worked on and has Google's vast cloud-dominion behind it), iOS(which has zero users who aren't Apple; but usually manages to show the virtues of having a competent dictator), and WP(currently pretty tepid marketshare; but is a testament to the fact that MS can actually bring some talent to bear on a problem if somebody beats the hubris out of them enough times in a row).

    That said, despite my low hopes, it sure would be nice to see it do better. Despite years of development, Android still bears some serious scars of either things that seemed like a good idea at the time(presumably back when supporting extremely resource constrained devices was still a consideration, in the period not long after it was developed as a successor to the OS used in 'sidekick' devices) or which simply didn't pan out(the not-actually-a-JVM-really-we-swear turned out not to be fast enough, so they added native extensions, and ARM turned out to more or less steamroller the competition in the smartphone space at about the same time, so nobody actually cared whether cross-platform worked or not, except Intel, who simply wrote up another shim to handle ARM native components). They say...nice...things about how well the audio system performs, as well.

    It ships on a wide variety of devices that you can actually buy, today; but Android is pretty hard to get enthusiastic about as a pile of stuff dumped on top of Linux. A slightly less dysfunctional pile of stuff wouldn't be revolutionary; but it would be nice.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mSparks43 ( 757109 )

      I'm going to talk a little bit of personal experience and opinion.

      What matters in tech is the "ultra high end".
      That is - what is "simply" the BEST device you can get.
      Right now it's the Samsung S5
      few years before that it was the HTC one
      few years before that it was the iPhone.

      Then there is everybody else who follows.
      Android was a success because the "best" devices (tablet and phone) ran it. we then set the stage for the rest of the market to follow.
      Similar story with games consoles and next gen video.
      PS3 was

      • I'm not entirely convinced of this(most notably, despite their absurd superiority to the toy crap offered by PC compatibles, Apple, Commodore, etc., essentially all 'workstation' hardware and operating systems, and often the vendors that made them, were crushed into the dust and sold off, and are either extinct or hanging on as high end servers that once had workstation equivalents, like IBM's AIX-on-Power stuff. Superior; but too costly. Even today's crazy-price-is-no-object workstation will be effectively
      • bring me a 16 core, 4Ghz phone, with a ton of ram and 3 days battery life and whatever OS you put on it will be the new standard.

        sigh. If only my Windows laptop was as powerful as that.

  • Nope (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @06:02AM (#48854893)
    What does Tizen do that Android doesn't? Or Windows Phone for that matter? It's just another software stack running over a kernel. Performance and battery life is likely to be little different.

    The only reason it exists at all is because Samsung sees Google taking 30% off of app sales and services and it wants that 30% for itself. That might be a wonderful motivating factor for Samsung to push this thing. For everyone else... not so much. Consumers will just see a new platform which has doesn't have the apps they want to use. App developers will just see yet another lame duck platform that they must spend inordinate effort to support or ignore completely.

    Unless Samsung money hats devs and hand out free phones like candy, they're not going to get the buy-in to their platform. And even if they do it's no guarantee - Nokia and Blackberry both went down that route trying to buy devs and it didn't pay off.

    • by caspy7 ( 117545 )

      Wait, isn't Tizen supposed to be able to run Android apps?
      If that's the case then it might not be as hard to tempt devs if all they need to do is list on Samsung's app store while they attempt to sweeten the deal in other ways (higher margins? free spa treatments?).

      • Apparently the new Blackberry OS was supposed to be able to run Android apps. It didn't help them at all. I think you were required to recompile the app for BlackBerry, but that shouldn't be that hard for most devs to do. Then again, it amazes me that the Amazon App store doesn't have every single app that the Google Play store has. Why would you want to limit the exposure of your app and not put it on the Amazon App store?
  • it looks terrible, doesn't have apps, compatibility (fixable), other company support, dev loving. I get that some beancounter is probably saying "hey, we pay Google 5 bucks per phone, if we didn't have to pay that, we'd make more profit", but breaking everything isn't the solution. And how they ignore their users for years over touchwiz, I'm not too trusting that Tizen will give users what they want. It /can/ be fixed a bit, by making a Cyanogenmod like version of it, release the base code somewhere, like
  • Tizen could replace Android within Samsung products.
    It needs to be better from both the users' perspective and from Samsung's.
    In my opinion that should be a "native code" system, not a Javascript one.
    Native code needs fewer computing resources and thus less energy.
  • This might be possible if Android were frozen in time, so Tizen could catch up. Unfortunately for Samsung, while they're developing something like Google Now, Google will be developing the next generation. It will be very hard to catch up while Android continues to move forward.

    On the other hand, Samsung has huge market share. Of there is anything keeping people on Samsung, some hardware trick or something that only Samsung can offer, they might get enough Tizen users not because people want Tizen but be

    • by N1AK ( 864906 )
      That isn't automatically a massive issue. Apple came into the smartphone market (shock horror for some that they didn't actually create it) after MS and some others. Google themselves came into the market after Apple. Apple continues to sell devices even though they were considerably behind Google on some functionality (and I'm sure the reverse is true).

      If Samsung can ensure that Android apps run perfectly well on Tizen, including Google apps like maps etc, then they're 80%+ to offering a mobile OS I'd m
      • by DrXym ( 126579 )

        If Samsung can ensure that Android apps run perfectly well on Tizen, including Google apps like maps etc, then they're 80%+ to offering a mobile OS I'd move to if the handset was one I wanted.

        The problem is they can't. Look at Blackberry in this department. Blackberry probably has the most mature Android stack running over BB10 / QNX but it's no damned good for apps that want to run background services, or support in-app payments, or use the Google services which the impl doesn't support. Then you're talking about forking the code to produce a BB compatible version stripped of that stuff or rebuilt with a 3rd party library. And Blackberry has another issue - Android apps, run over some Frankandr

      • Android compatibility can be a double-edged sword. Without it, they might not have the apps to attract users and without the users, they won't attract the developers to make apps. They fall into the chicken-egg problem that Blackberry has found itself in. Even if the underlying OS is vastly superior, customers won't flock to it without the apps.

        On the other hand, if all Android apps work on Tizen, then customers might ask why they should buy a Tizen device instead of a "real Android" device.

        Switching off

        • I've a fair bit of experience here but: do you know how the average consumer buys a phone? By average I mean of the millions that make an iphone or whatever successful? They walk in to a store, all hurr-durr, ask "what's good?" and get lead to either an iPhone, or a Galaxy whatever, depending on which store they walked into, and how many northface jackets they're wearing that day, because that's what makes money for the sale. The consumer doesn't see past the brand and barely registers the device runs an
      • I've got an N5 now, but to say Apple was behind Google in the early days of android is.....silly. I had an iPhone 2g and a Tmobile G1. The iPhone blew android out of the fucking water at the time.
  • All the arguments made for Tizen were made a few years back for Bada, another Samsung "for entry level phones" OS. It worked on a technical level. At one point it was selling reasonably well in some European markets. I have a Bada phone I bought for development. If you're in the US and never saw Bada, it's because it never made it to the US, and now it's history. Really not sure why Tizen is going to fare differently.

  • by Chrisq ( 894406 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @07:09AM (#48855049)
    we will know if it makes the big time when Microsoft decides its worth suing for "unspecified patent infringements"
  • Having jumped ship from the iPhone to Android once Android matured and re-purchased all my apps ranging from $.99 to $89.00, I have no desire to switch platforms again, even if many or even "most" Android apps run on Tizen via ACL.

  • It makes sense to me That they would create a new OS. Have you ever read their Privacy Policy?
    Common http://www.samsung.com/us/comm... [samsung.com]. I have a SamSung_HDTV_32F6300AFXZA It's a Smart TV and lots of bells and whistles as a TV or media player, but I only use it as a computer monitor due to the Privacy Policy.
    Which is different than the common one, and the third one you have to agree to while setting up a HDTV.

    I do take the time to read privacy policies and ToS's, of all of them SamSung's shows them as being

    • The Privacy Policy I read long before the phone or TV states if you have legal issues with Samsung, they claim jurisdiction in some province in South Korea, which you have previously agreed to.

      That's meaningless; your local laws will still apply. Microsoft couldn't get out of paying fines in the EU for monopolistic behaviour by saying "tough, you'll have to sue us in Washington". (Well, they could, but then they wouldn't be allowed to trade in the EU).

  • The big question is: Can they attract developers? If not, they'll need to be able to run Android apps natively. Once you are doing that, why not just run Android, an OS where somebody else bears most of the development cost?

    I can see Samsung being more successful at this than Amazon was, but Samsung also doesn't have the motivations Amazon had/has for doing so.

    • As a mobile developer I'm drawn to Tizen because it doesn't have the cruft that Android does and is possibly even more open. I want a Tizen phone to play with. The SDK and tools look mature and the simulator works well. I like that you don't have a .Net/Java virtual machine in your way.

      Despite Android having a much improved java engine, it's still lacking in a lot of ways:
      • - no Java8 Lambda goodness on Android(and likely never will be)
      • - Dalvik still has garbage collection slowdowns at inexplicable times.
  • by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @07:50AM (#48855175)

    Android has matured and leads in apps. And it's freely available for a wide range of devices already. I don't see anybody coming close to the package Google can offer, tie-in services included. Apple sells hardware - their services are a loss. MS sells business software, subscriptions to MS Office, Consoles and now tablets. AFAICT they are behind in comodity computing now.

    Google makes money selling *you*. They can give away all their stuff for free, including their services. As soon as one vendor has to pay extra to adapt Tizen, there will be a strong incentive to look into Android again. Or Chrome OS as the case may be. All Google needs to do is perhaps offer a few cheap-and-easy co-branding options for their OS.

    Google wants to bring the second half of humanity online, along with any hardware vendor that cares to emphasise the bottom line.
    I think they have a very good chance of succeeding.

    My 2 cents.

  • I regard Android as an abomination, basically engineered to geo-locate us, sell us stuff, isolate us from the web, 'give' us tons of mutually incompatible insecure 'apps' all in an unnecessary thick 'sauce' of Java, the COBOL of the 1990s. See also, this rant: http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/... [techcrunch.com] and this: http://blog.codinghorror.com/a... [codinghorror.com]. Of course, it's Google too, though, in principle, open-source, another huge reason to avoid.

    So I'm waiting for Linux phones, essentially I probably trust Canonical more
    • Java, the COBOL of the 1990s

      So wildly successful and used for shifting trillions of dollars around? Java has very little in common with COBOL, except features that all languages have in common. What should they have used instead of Java? The memory leak brothers C and C++? Javascript? LISP? FORTRAN?

      The reason why phone apps are popular is because they're a lot easier to use and a lot more functional than web apps. How do you query your device's hardware from a browser? How do you turn the flash on and

      • Java, the COBOL of the 1990s

        Java has very little in common with COBOL, except features that all languages have in common.

        Java is almost as unnecessarily wordy as COBOL. Almost...

  • Really hope not, as the last thing the world needs is another locked up portable media player with a mobile network connection.

    I had high hopes for Around 3.x/4.0, but since then Google has bent over backwards to placate big media while trying to pass the changes off as security improvements.

  • All Google services are blocked in China, so there are hundreds of millions of Android phones with no access to the play store. At the same time, most mobile phone manufacturers are designing their phones for the Chinese market and following Chinese trends. Tizen could do very well there. The communists think they are helping their own domestic tech companies, but they are really just helping Samsung and other non-googles.
  • Is Tizen running X-windows?
    That is one thing I like about my N900: I can pretty easily compile old x-windows programs, and I can ssh to a remote machine and pop up a remote program. Or I can just copy my python-gtk scripts to my phone and they just work.

    • by Uecker ( 1842596 )

      No, as far as I know it runs Wayland. The same as Jolla. I would replace my aging N9 with a new Linux phone with X11, but sadly there is none. We now have Linux phones with no backwards compatibility to Linux... Sigh.

  • My experience with all tablets and phones by Samsung (and other devices too) has been most underwhelming, especially with regards to support. Yep! You can count with your device being supported for about 3 months. You will NEVER get any software updates besides that. Still on android 4.2 for a ~1 year old Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0. No intentions of going above that. Sure... let me think about my next Samsung purchase will be... NEVER!
  • by Graydyn Young ( 2835695 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @09:52AM (#48855853)
    As a Tizen dev you get a bigger cut of sales... and it's not anywhere near worth it.

    I once saw a full grown man in tears while he was trying to write a simple Tizen app.

    I attended a Hackthon once where a team was trying to write a Tizen app, and at the end of the Hackathon none of them were speaking to each other.

    Seriously, it's like pulling teeth. I've been an Android/IOS/Blackberry developer for more years than I care to admit, and I'd rather carve "Hello World!" into my own flesh than write it in Tizen.

  • If Samsung wants to muscle Apple and Google on app/software sales, don't they have the might to create an independent app store for their phones? I don't believe there is anything that would prevent it as Amazon sells Android apps independent of Google's app store. That would be much less risky and complex than trying to introduce yet another smartphone OS into what is already available.

    • Verizon has their own independent app store on their phones, too. Does anyone use it? Not really...

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