Most smartphone users are probably very familiar with mobile operating systems like iOS, Android, Symbian, BlackBerry and Windows Phone. But what many people don’t know is that Samsung also developed its own mobile operating system – the Bada. Samsung’s proprietary OS was launched with much fanfare in 2009. The company said it was a ground-breaking piece of software and had pinned a lot of hope on this OS. The Bada will eventually claim a two percent share of the mobile phone market.
But Samsung’s hopes for the Bada has ran out. The company has announced that it has decided to merge the Bada with Intel’s Tizen. The Tizen is actually the resurrection of an old mobile operating system project that Intel was developing with Nokia. The Finnish mobile phone manufacturer will eventually leave the project. Samsung decided to partner with Intel and the two companies announced the development of the Tizen last year.
According to Samsung, work on the new project is already underway but no completion date has yet been identified. Since both the Tizen and Bada are based on the Linux operating system, their interoperability will not be a problem. The Tizen will actually be backwards compatible with Bada. In fact, their SDKs are almost the same. This means developers can already start developing Tizen apps without skipping a beat.
Up until now, Samsung still doesn’t know what kind devices will eventually use this Bada and Tizen system. The current buzz is that it will be used on both smartphones in the middle class of the market and on non-smartphone products – which could well be tablets. Samsung said that it plans to release at least two phones powered by Tizen this year. The company also stressed that the Tizen will not become the company’s main mobile operating system.
