“While Apple was busy last week wooing developers and consumers alike at the Worldwide Developers Conference with substantial updates to its popular iOS and Mac OS operating systems, many seemed to miss the Tizen Developer Conference happening just down the street,” Ashraf Eassa writes for The Motley Fool.
“Tizen is an open source operating system that lives within the Linux Foundation and is led by a technical steering group consisting of smartphone heavyweight, Samsung, chip giant Intel, and a number of others,” Eassa writes. “The questions on everybody’s minds are whether Samsung will make a real push to bring this to market and, if it does, whether it will be successful.”
“Right off the bat, Tizen has a limited app selection, one announced smartphone (launching in the third quarter of 2014 in Russia), and lead backers (Samsung and Intel) that both have substantial investments in developing Android. Oh, and apparently Intel didn’t even win the applications processor slot for this device. Not exactly a recipe for overnight success,” Eassa writes. “This is likely an emerging market/low-cost device play. Given that the midrange to high end of the market more or less belongs to Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, and given the fairly substantial investments those companies have made in their ecosystems, Tizen is likely a nonstarter in more mature markets and, more generally, at the high end of the smartphone space. However, for markets in which the feature phone to smartphone transition hasn’t really hit in full force yet, and for markets that are very cost sensitive, Tizen still has a chance.”
Read more in the full article here.