Samsung to merge Bada with Tizen, because the industry needs yet another mobile OS

Stefan Constantinescu — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 07:35:49 +0000

Once upon a time, on a cold winter day in Finland, a couple of Nokia engineers began work on a project called Maemo. The goal was to create a brand new mobile operating system based on Linux that had no relationship to Symbian, which at the time was the world’s most popular smartphone platform. The first Maemo device, the Nokia 770, hit the market in late 2005. Had it come out in 2012 the technology press would have called it Nokia’s answer to the Apple iPad, but back then it was nothing more than an “internet tablet” that Nokia saw a smartphone accessory more than anything else. Fast forward to February 2010, Nokia announced that they would merge the Maemo project with Moblin, which was Intel’s brand new Linux based operating system, and call the resulting love child MeeGo. When Stephen Elop, a former Microsoft employee, became the CEO of Microsoft just a few months later in September, MeeGo’s future was put into question. Twelve months later (September 2011 if you’re having a hard time keeping track) Intel announces that Nokia is no longer working on MeeGo, and that Samsung will take Nokia’s place. Their collaborative project became known as Tizen.

With that backstory in place, let’s talk about Bada, which Samsung launched in early 2010. It’s essentially a really good clone of Android, but unlike Android it doesn’t exactly have a huge amount of market share. We don’t know how well Bada is doing because Samsung doesn’t say how many Bada device they’ve shipped, but for the purposes of this article that’s not really important. What’s important is that last week Samsung announced that they’re going to be merging Bada with Tizen. When are we going to see the first products based on this Frankenstein OS? Not anytime soon according to Tae-Jin Kang, Senior Vice President of Samsung’s Content Planning Team.

This begs the question: Why is Samsung bothering with Bada/Tizen in the first place?

Mozilla’s new mobile OS is farther along than we thought, set to be shown off in Q1 2012

Stefan Constantinescu — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 12:16:12 +0000

Back in July we brought you news of Mozilla’s new smartphone operating system called “Boot to Gecko”, known as B2G for short. It’s essentially Android under the hood, but with a user interface that’s built using web technologies, so it “borrows” the principles behind Palm’s failed webOS. Now when we wrote up that article it was a bit tongue in cheek since we thought it would never get off the ground, but low and behold it’s actually progressing faster than any of us could have anticipated. There’s already a mockup for the user interface, codenamed Gaia, that’s being worked on by former Google London intern Ben Francis, and the B2G group also had their first virtual meeting last week. They’ve got a roadmap that says they plan to demo their work in Q1 of 2012 and make it available to the market by the end of the first half of next year. Installing it will be a process that should be familiar to those of you who flash custom Android ROMs such as CyanogenMod or MIUI.

Will B2G get any traction once it’s actually out? That’s another question all together, because let’s be frank, no one cares about open source software. People care about products, and if said product was built on open code then great, but it’s not essential. Take Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s BlackBerry portfolio for example. Both have browsers based on open source WebKit code, but no one buys a BlackBerry because it has an awesome browser, quite the contrary, it’s actually terrible. And likewise no one buys the iPhone because Apple is leveraging open source software. When it comes to open B2G isn’t even the only player. They’ll have to compete with Canonical, makers of Ubuntu, who say they’ll launch a complete built from scratch smartphone operating system by 2014.

All we know is this, projects like B2G are built by people who already have full time jobs. It’s a hobby more than anything else. Are you going to take serious an OS that was born as a way for geeks to pass the time?

Exactly.

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Samsung to merge Bada with Tizen, because the industry needs yet another mobile OS

Mozilla’s new mobile OS is farther along than we thought, set to be shown off in Q1 2012