I had the misfortune of being tasked with developing a tech demo for an embedded version of Tizen for one of the Tizen stakeholders. Despite the insistence by the client that Tizen 2.0 was demo-ready, it quickly became clear that it was in extremely early alpha stages and nowhere near ready for even a tech demo. The networking stack was extremely buggy and would fail with too many concurrent connections. The web runtime was dog slow and doing a simple DOM insertion would cause the system to lock up for up to 20 seconds. All the while we were promised that a better version was "coming soon" and would be ready for the scheduled demonstration. Of course, this never happened, the demo was called off, some business people lost their jobs and I quit the company. Overall, it was a massive embarrassment for everyone involved.
Because OEMs like Samsung have done such an incredible job modifying and skinning Android that I'm sure we can expect great things when they're responsible for the entire experience from the ground up?
You say that but I was playing with a (older) Nexus running vanilla ICS "as it was meant to be" the other day and moaning about something (I was attempting to add something to the home screen I think). A couple of the Android users in the office came over to see what I was moaning about.
After 60 seconds of looking at it they both admitted that the thing I was moaning about was horrible but that it wasn't something they had to deal with on their Galaxy S3s. When they showed me the S3 it's mechanism was definitely more intuitive (at least to the three of us).
While I'm not defending the skinning efforts of OEMs generally, I don't think the historical position of "it's all awful" is necessarily true any more. Sure there are bad things in there but there were plenty of bad things in early versions of Android. Just as Google learned there are signs that the OEMs are learning too.
I second this. I've gone back and forth between the vanilla CM9 build and the Samsung touchwiz on my Galazy S2. While the CM9 feels faster and cleaner, it's all lacks some key features. For example the vanilla music player doesn't support displaying ID3 MP3 lyrics, a feature my windows mobile phone could do back in 2003. This feature is critical for podcast courses with embedded lecture notes. And yes, the widgets work better in touchwiz too. In the end, I always go back to the more feature complete touchwiz.
I got a Nexus S specifically because I wanted stock Android... but is TouchWiz really that bad? What can you do on stock Android that you can't do on TouchWiz?
I've got an s3 and a nexus 7, so I can compare both in the long term. Touchwiz is not a bad product, though it adds actually very few to stock experience.
The main problem is that for such minor enhancements, you are condemn to be always late in android updates.
We are now fairly aware that updates are not only about getting new features and bugfixes, but also are the main mean to avoid security breaches.
If OEMs don't get that, what to expect if they build their own OS ? Not saying it will be bad, but they'll have hard time to alleviate my worries about that.
> Touchwiz is not a bad product, though it adds actually very few to stock experience.
Not anymore, anyway. But TouchWiz added quite a bit before ICS came out. Off the top of my head: a customisable dock bar, resizable widgets, a paginated app menu, the app switcher you get when holding 'home', power saving toggles in the notifications drop down...
Admittedly these days it's just a way for Samsung to put a unified, iPhone-like interface across all of its phones, but in the beginning it added a number of features missing from Android.
Yeah, a lot of what was in TouchWiz is now in stock Android.
This is probably kind of subjective, but my problem with TouchWiz is it's butt-ugly. I mean, if you think stock Android was a mess (and it's not so bad now with Holo) then TouchWiz is to stock Android as a 2 year old's art project is to the Mona Lisa.
It's a horrible mess of Holo, Gingerbread and just weird random stuff that doesn't fit with either.
Yeah, I agree. That's the reason why I stay away from Samsung phones. In practical terms they're great, but they're shockingly un-aesthetic. In hardware and software.
TouchWiz is ugly. That's my major problem with it. The cartoonish icons take up way too much room in the notification window, unnecessary and useless animations slow me down. Mainly though it just isn't very good looking.
I'm not so sure. Google is stronger for software, whereas companies like Samsung, Sony, HTC etc. are better at hardware, which is my their marriage with Android has worked so well. The likes of Sense and Touchwiz do add some nice features, but they also add a lot of rubbish. It will take ages for hardware-focused companies like Samsung to catch up with Google's software experience.
He was being sarcastic =P
From my experience with a galaxy s2, most of the software from Samsung is not that great (and can't be removed without installing something like cyanogen... quite annoying).
I want it to succeed so badly because I was a huge fan of the Nokia N900 and the N9. But it won't. They haven't released the OS yet and it already feels dead in the water.
The first video I can find of "Tizen 2.0" on YouTube is from 3 months ago and shows a very slow interface. It resembles Android a lot, but Android is much faster as of 4.0+, so why would anyone use Tizen? There are no apps to showcase as well; if you're gonna make a new smartphone platform, get people to make apps.
There's nothing on the Tizen page that makes me think that developers will find any interest here. Combined with BBX OS and WP8 in addition to the already vibrant Android and iOS ecosystems, why would anyone make a Tizen app?
And so this is doomed to fail like Maemo/Meego, it seems. Maybe I'm wrong. Or maybe some company will once again adopt it and merge the code making it even more of a mongrel.
Tizen suffers from the same problem as Meego did - too much corporate control and no open development whatsoever.
If you liked N900/N9 and Maemo/Meego - you'll better like Mer and derivatives. They have more chances to succeed, since they don't suffer from the risk of some company pulling the plug from the whole project.
I compared Tizen and Meego. Meego development and direction was too tightly controlled by Nokia (and Intel). When they quit - the project fell apart. Community forked it as Mer (Meego Relaunched), which has open development. Mer however is only the core. End user distributions are based on it. So far there are Nemo, Plasma Active and Sailfish.
Yeah, a new entry in this market needs the, "It sucks, but..." Without the 'but', it's never going to matter. The 'but' gets you a small following who will help polish an otherwise bad product, and maybe push it towards something competitive.
Like you said, I don't even know what else I want my phone to do though, that wouldn't be possible in Android.
I definitely would! I'm very interested in the first phones to be released, although I feel that consumers may be too entrenched already. But either way, I'd be interested.
I only hope that there will be a way for me to try the OS on my SGS3 because I'm a broke college student. Actually, I never owned the N900 or N9. At the time, I was in high school and couldn't afford it, but I loved the phones regardless.
Fortunately, I have touched the early version of Tizen and the prototype base on Tizen. On the prototype machine I saw real "multi-tasks" like we have on laptop, and terminal application ran sweetly.
I asked one of their consultant a question:"Meego replaces Symbian, then Tizen replaced Meego, then who will be the next to replace Tizen?" At that time, Tizen had Cooperation with Samsung. Then, Windows replaced Tizen, to Nokia, big thanks, Elop!
Now we have Jolla, Ubuntu, Firefox, and so on. Along with iOS and Android, make me think of PC desktop, there we have Windows, Mac OS, huge amount of Linux Distros. Could the circumstances on mobile os platform as well as desktop os platform?
Again. Why Apple showing off their amount of apps? Apps is the key. Apps bring possibility to achieve any tasks, not the OS, especially for a mobile os who has not prepared for its UI guideline. I imagine that some apps have back buttons, some don't; some back buttons on the left-top and others on the bottom. When you want to do some operation you have to locate first where the right button was placed.
All it did is just provide a opportunity, that out of control of Android and iOS, the region there people hate close and love openness. I really hope Tizen will be successful, that's also means Linux's success, the openness's success.
I think you're missing one point. The PC market is open to OS developers and users, there's a well known spec and the user can install any OS he wants, but that's not possible (with some minor exceptions, and you may depend on Android) in the mobile market.
Until the OS is reasonably independent of the device, I can't see how Ubuntu, FirefoxOS, or Tizen could compete if they can't access to users (even if some, like Mozilla, have deals with phone companies; do I need to buy a specific phone to run their OS?).
You can't legally install Mac OS on PC's. You can install Some Linux on, maybe almost PCs but still have some troubles. PCs have restrict hardware standards. But Mobile devices have not explicitly.
Users can also install other mobile OS on their mobile devices, for example HTC's HD2, it not only can install Windows mobile/XP/7, Linux, Android, also can install dual-OS. As well as Samsung's Nexus, HTC G1...
Firefox OS at first showed us on a Samsung's Galaxy III (?) device. Ubuntu on Galaxy Nexus. They just don't expect to use pre-installed Android devices to run their OS, OS doesn't make money without hardware devices and apps.
They have their own markets. Like Firefox, they promise to provide cheap devices, the main market may depend on South America I don't know.
Well, if you can't install Mac OS on a PC is because the software vendor doesn't want you to do so.
But get any PC and you can install several OSes without being too picky on the hardware. It's accepted that the hardware and the software are different things.
If I want to try FirefoxOS I don't wont to buy a FirefoxOS mobile phone, and it looks like that's going to be the only way.
Not the software vendor, it is Apple who does not allow all but Apple's own machines to run Mac OS. It's ilegal but NOT impossible, we see a lot of Hackintosh.
So, you can taste Firefox OS now, it is difficulty as installing Mac OS on PCs, maybe more difficulty. If Firefox OS is popular, I believe you can see more and more devices runs Firefox OS who have pre-installed other OS.
What they did just promise that theoretically speaking, you can run Firefox OS on any devices running Android, whatever Tizen, Ubuntu, Firefox OS. Linux means run anywhere, any platform, impossible. And anyway, Android based on Linux.
> Not the software vendor, it is Apple who does not allow all but Apple's own machines to run Mac OS.
I'm confused here. I thought Apple is Mac OS' vendor. So, yes... as I said it's because Apple. If the OS vendor wants it to be run on a PC, there's no special requirement.
Anyway, that's not the relevant part of my original comment. I can't see how FirefoxOS will be popular if installing it is difficult (even hacky) or if it only works on some specific devices.
We need a market were you buy a phone (that comes with an OS), but you're free to install anything else because hardware != software.
Install anything easily? Never mind. If you install various OSes on your mobile device, you are not using it, you are playing with it.
Users don't mind the OS, users don't pay for operating system, users pay for tools, pay for resolutions. They need highly integrated user experience to complete their tasks, so hardware is very important to software.
Who needs a market with free and easy OS installing? Who needs to switch his/her phone's OS? Geeks, or who wants to act like a geek.
You could argue the same about Linux. I installed my first distro back in 1998. I wasn't forced to buy a PC with Linux installed in order to start using it, and it was easier than it is today to install any OS in your mobile phone.
How many Linux users are out there? Are all of them "geeks"?
Install Linux on PC is easier than on Mobile devices? Phone and MID and Tablet and Pad?
I tried hackintosh on my HP laptop(R.I.P), I failed. I tried
I tried to install FreeBSD and Fedora from USB sitck, I failed, my colleagues failed as well.
I tried to burn OpenSUSE...iso, I failed
I am using ubuntu and fedora on my thinkpad, occasionally using OpenSUSE, all upgraded to the newest stable versions, they never run smoothly and productively like Mac OS on my Mac.
I tried arch, I gave up cause the endless options confused me and made me agony.
You don't need to be forced buy mobile devices to use another os, as I mentioned before, ubuntu showed off their mobile os on Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Firefox used Galaxy II of III I'm not sure, if they can why you can't?
mobile devices using different CPU structures,
My point:
Linux was, is and will be for "geeks", not for people who use computer as assistance/tool for completing tasks, just like note, pen, phone, ... Linux is always falling behind the hardware evolution. So it has to adapt hardware drivers. Linux never does things like Mac or Windows does.
You even can't simply complete a task, such as customize desktop theme, listen music and watch video you download from internet on just online, your favorite services like google drive, evernote, Cisco IPsec VPN, without tricking or hacking.
The only way they can compete in a market such as this is to partner with a manufacturer, and the end result is that they have to play to the manufacturers whim (and often the operators whim if the manufacturer wants to ship devices). The end result is absolutely crap devices loaded with useless "value added" apps and skins.
If they could make something revolutionary that people want to have no matter what (like Apple did) then some manufacturers might start selling such devices anyway. But my hopes aren't high for that happening anytime soon.
Windows never replaced tizen since nokia never worked on tizen.
Tizen is considered to be meego with nokia replaced by samsung.
In fact it's only Samsung Linux Platform with some Intel work: Qt has been replaced by EFL.
This website really tells me nothing about what Tizen is, what it looks like, what hardware it runs on, or really any sort of practical information whatsoever. But hey, at least I can get the SDK?
They just did not know exactly how to describe that correctly.
I have to say they do not see very clearly what they are doing and where they are going. They want follow Android's route, catch up then surpass?
that's about all you need to know right there. support is planned for smartphones, tablets, netbooks, in-vehicle infotainment, and smart tvs, and it's not even released yet?
Well, archive.org has a version of the "about" page from Oct 2011 that reads almost the same. According to the Wikipedia the Tizen project was created back in Sep 2011 (renamed from LiMO, that was founded in 2007 and had released several version of their platform).
So it looks like they've been in the business for some time, I guess they're aiming to a market that is a moving target.
exactly, my point is that they need to start by focusing on something smaller and nailing it, then they can move on to expanding and nailing those areas too.
I'm really not excited about this new OS. What I'm looking for is an open hardware standard like the PC AT was in its time. What I'm also looking for is a development framework which makes the hardware differences transparent and makes my code fully portable across all the different devices. As a user I don't want to be locked in.
Android development tutorials and using Eclipse give me head aches. I'm using QtCreator for years, even for pure C/C++ programs, and it really rocks.
Might want to check out Ubuntu for Phones due out in a month or so for the GSM Galaxy Nexus. Its recommended method of app development is using Qt + QML and QtCreator.
It doesn't need to be anything new, radical, or anything of the sort. All it aims to be is an Android-alike that Google doesn't control. (ideally one that also enables easy porting of Android code and assets)
With this fixed goal and with Samsung's money, it'll succeed.
True. But trashy in-house Experience Apps are ubiquitous and only going to improve. I think the idea here is that Samsung has an out if they end up needing it.
They'll change, but I wouldn't take it for granted that they'll improve. It's easy to make a new version, but it takes massive effort to make sure that you are converging on something great as you iterate.
You do know Samsung is already doing that, and is very successful at it ? They're the #1 Android maker. So they must have their reasons for wanting to escape Google's control.
It's really not a fork in the way forks go. They have to stay compatible to a point with the master AOSP branch as per agreements with Google. Amazon has no such obligations.
What? They lay their own TouchWiz UI over Android but I'd hardly call it a fork. Amazon's version is a fork. Unless you have secret information to share.
Samsung tried that with Bada, too. It didn't work. I think people are really underestimating the power of an ecosystem. Look at WP8 how much it's struggling in low single digits even after billions invested in deals and promotions, and money paid to developers to make apps.
Samsung has nothing. It doesn't even have the content Amazon has, which only got popular with Kindle Fire because people were looking for a "hero" against the iPad, and their very affordable $200 "Android-based" tablet seemed to be that one.
>>>Has any software produced by Samsung ever made you say "I wish I could use more of this"? Touchwiz?
From what I have seen from users on YouTube, the multi-window feature Sammy brought to Android looks good. And actually does screen splitting better than Windows 8 (no fixed width presets).
Bada outsold Windows Phone in one quarter in 2011.
Samsung didn't release a single new Bada Phone in 2012.
Windows Phone 7 had a horrible start in it's first calendar year for a plethora of reasons (at one point Windows Mobile 6.5 was still selling almost as much), but after Nokia started their development in earnest, sales have taken off (well, "taken off" relative to previous years)
Why is Bada (developed in-house, costing Samsung money) cheaper to deploy than Android (developed by others, free to use)? Why would a Bada phone be cheaper?
Citation please? Is that a recent change? Otherwise a $15 fee seems at least an order of magnitude off.
Android hit 200 million activations in November 2011. It hit over 500 million in September 2012.
Assuming the $15 fee was in effect when Android hit 200 million, then Google got roughly $4.5 billion in licensing fees in less than a year. Even Google (earning roughly $2.8 billion last quarter) would probably have trouble hiding that much pocket change in an earnings statement.
A year or so ago I was contracting with a military supplier. The company makes rugged Windows CE handhelds and was looking at jumping to Android. $15 per device was the quote they got from Google.
Now that you mention the number of activations, it's obvious Samsung is not paying that price.
That tracks with something else I heard about recently via Twitter: Indian Android OEMs releasing devices without Google Play because they had problems with Google's terms/fees. That was confusing because the only thing I'd seen about Android's economics ( http://www.asymco.com/2012/05/13/android-economics-an-introd... ) said that the money flowed in the other direction: Google paying OEMs for search traffic, etc.
However, if Google is discriminating between OEMs then that makes more sense. The typical terms (that, say, Samsung or HTC gets) might be quite generous, but the Indian OEMs don't get the same deal. I find it a bit surprising that Google couldn't come up with better terms for the huge but poor Indian market, but maybe there were non-export clauses or something similar that got in the way.
For for low-volume products like that, I'd expect a high per-unit cost. The support overhead will vastly outweigh the money Google might make in purchases via the Play store.
How many people are choosing to buy a phone because it has Android? Gingerbread accounts for 48% of Android devices because many Android users just want a cheap or "free with contract" phone.
Nah, Gingerbread is on 48% of devices because of the broken model where the carrier and phone maker get to decide if the phone gets Android OS updates or not and they have no direct incentive to provide updates (because unlike Apple they aren't making money on the app side to justify the OS update costs), in fact they have incentive not to provide updates in order to persuade users to upgrade to new devices as soon as their contract is up.
This combined with the fact that ICS was only released a little more than a year ago (half the term of most people's cell phone contracts) and Honeycomb was never officially put on to phones.
While some of those Gingerbread phones were in fact just "cheap phones" a lot of them were also high end (and everything in between) for the time they were sold.
In the third world, price is a bigger concern than ecosystem. People will buy the cheapest phone that offers some smartphone features. Right now, this product selection is limited to Bada and the lowest-end Android phones. Nobody else caters to this market.
Is it a competitor to Android in terms of being able to run n the same hardware? Or is it that it's just another smartphone platform, like 'Droid, Apple, BlackBerry, etc? All I see listed is that it is a phone platform.
It's a Samsung platform, Linux-based. Like Windows 8, many of the services are HTML5-based; the bundled browser is Webkit and actually tops HTML5 test benchmarks among mobile browsers: http://html5test.com/results/mobile.html
I worked with a company that was halfheartedly pitched a couple of demo hardware units last year running Tizen 1.0 for evaluation purposes - they wanted HTML5-based games and apps to bundle with the system or feature prominently on what I assume is an upcoming app store. I wasn't impressed with its broken JS support at the time and didn't look into what it would have taken to rewrite the games to run properly on the platform, but maybe they've come a long way since then?
It looks like Tizen, Ubuntu Mobile and Firefox OS are all going down the HTML5 apps running on Linux kernel route. I really hope applications built for any of these will run on the other 2 seamlessly.
Are there any technical reasons why one of these OSs will be more successful than the others or is it all down to marketing and the budgets behind them?
I'm hoping 2013 or 2014 will be the year I can `sudo apt-get install vim`.
It sounds trivial, but I don't know how to pronounce Tizen. Nor will many others without hearing it first.
Is it TieZin, Tizzen, Tie Zen?
Android, iOS and Windows are all easy to read and pronounce, so we can and do so. But this silly little thing slows the word of mouth spread - as few want to commit the social faux pas of saying something the wrong way.
Something to consider for your own startup.
This doesn't matter. I hear people say "I os" and "I O S". No one cares. Most people will pronounce this one "Samsung" or "Nokia" or whatever company ships it.
In Scandinavia (and other places with strongly Germanic-based languages) "Eeeh Oh Ess" is probably just as common. Haven't seemed to hurt Apple at all.
Sceptical about running everything on top of HTML5. Even a specially tailored JVM has proven challenging to optimise, rendering 512MiB mobile devices into laggy paging machines.
Apple got something right: compiling to the metal is not obsolete and it won't be in the foreseeable future. Batteries are not going to last "too long to matter" and devices are not going to be exceedingly quick for the task, not any time soon if ever.
It would have been a lot more effective to provide hardware support to executable code sandboxing than running a sandbox on top of virtualised hardware. Being Google almost exclusively software people at the time the Android project was devised, I think they missed big time in the performance front. But they still made up for it in open fronts and they're leading the market.
Would any vendor except Samsung ever ship a Tizen device? If being under the influence of a company like Google bothers them, can you imagine how they would feel about being under Samsung's control?
That's how I would interpret it as well. But then I wonder what are they hoping to achieve by pitching it as open source. If nobody else is going to get on board then it's just them playing in their own sand pit.
I'd actually really love for a "true" linux based OS without the limitations of Android to gain traction, but a single-vendor ecosystem doesn't attract me.
If you happen to plan on making yet another mobile OS, make sure it runs Android apps. Anything that is a burden to the developers will not fly easily.
Bada OS? It's fast, so what? People slowly get that "smart phone with touch screen and facebook" is not really a selling point and start to look for Google if not iPhone.
Can any of these alternatives prosper if Google provides little or no integration of its services? Even new iPhone users had to wait quite a bit for an updated Maps app, which seemed strategically sound... Why would the story be any better for these unproven alternatives?
Yet another one. It depends on hardware manufactures how they're going to use and market the products. Though android is open source, it's heavily driven by Google. It's hard to leave their clutches.
Doesn't seem to do anything that Android and/or Firefox OS doesn't already deliver. To me it looks like yet another corporate trying to play innovator.
AND ... where are the app developers going to come from? The good ones are already flat out with IOS & Android and if they have any free bandwidth, then they'll look at Firefox OS which at least Mozilla behind it and with that considerable credibility for being able to deliver.
You only need to look at Nokia and HP efforts and how they fizzled to see that Tizen's chances are limited before it even gets out of the starting gate.
If you want something similar to the Windows 7 UI wise, but running Linux, run KDE on top of whatever distro you choose. Some come with it already like Kubuntu (Ubuntu OS + KDE) or Gentoo.
If you're looking for something completely different, there's always Ubuntu's fork of Gnome (Unity), which is Ubuntu's default desktop. There'a also Gnome 3 as well as XFCE and some others.
I can't necessarily say why, but I'm way more interested in Firefox OS (boot2gecko) than this.
edit: Actually, Tizen looks to support Firefox OS as first-rate (though Firefox OS apps should run in any browser anyway if it supports the emerging device apis). Tizen might wind up being the more hacker-targeted device if it runs Linux and Firefox OS apps. I know it would have my interest as someone who is pretty much 100% happy with my Galaxy Nexus.
Makes perfect sense! Everything in Samsung is riding on Google's good graces and a company making tens of billions a year needs to have plan B, C and D.
