Going into the Tizen Developer Conference there were a few major
questions that people wanted answers to. The developers wanted to know
details about the Tizen App Store, everyone wanted to know when we’d see
the first Tizen devices, which would be the carriers supporting them,
and what about the big games apps?
The keynote did manage to answer a few of those questions, albeit
in not complete detail. Tizen devices are coming this year,
but Jong-Deok Choi, EVP, Samsung won’t be more specific. In terms of
operator support, Roy Sugimura from NTT DOCOMO has stated that they will
be carrying the first Tizen device in the second half of this year.
Frederic Dufal, Devices Technical Director for Orange has also announced
that they are committed to launching a Tizen project this year.
- The big change from Tizen 1.0 to the current 2.1 release is the
ability to run native apps. Samsung has folded Bada into the platform,
although this was not specifically mentioned in the keynote.
- The Tizen Store has been announced, and is open for app developers to submit their apps. Users cannot access it yet.
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Tizen 2 also has an inbuilt security layer, McAfee has contributed to this.
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A
Tizen App Challenge
has been announced. Submissions will be accepted June 1 onwards, and a total of 4$ Million is up for grabs.
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Also big news for gaming enthusiasts, some of the top gaming engines like Unity, Havok, Game Salad are coming to Tizen.
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NTT DOCOMO will make a Tizen device available in the second half of the year.
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So will Orange. They like Tizen because of its open nature, and HTML5 focus.
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We also got a look at the in
vehicle application of Tizen, Jaguar | Land Rover wants to push
the boundaries of what people expect from a in-car Linux based system. A
competition to generate ideas, UI elements and functionality is also
under way.
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Finally, the next major release
of Tizen will be the big 3.0. Expect this release in 2014 devices. The
roadmap for the release isn’t complete yet, and the development will be
done openly on Tizen.org. They encourage platform developers and other
open source developers to contribute.
- There is a tremendous amount of push to bring big
name developers to Tizen. Facebook, Angry Birds were named in the
keynote. I saw demoes of Gameloft’s Asphalt 7 and Real Golf running on a
Tizen reference device, along with games based on the Unity engine,
games from Sega, and Opera Mini.
