Tizen Shows Up in Smartphones, Ultrabooks, and Cars

I’ve seen a lot of tweets about Tizen in the last fews days, mainly because Tizen Conference 2013 just took place. First there’s been Tizen 2.1 SDK release, and few demos have surfaced,  showcasing Tizen in their target devices: smartphones, tablets,smart TVs, laptops, and In-vehicle infotainment devices. Beside all the work done, the companies behind the project will also offer $4 million to developers who publish apps on Tizen store. There will be 9 categories. The best 3 games will get $200,000 each, and the best apps in the other 6 categories $120,000 each. Tizen App Challenge will start on June 3, 2013, and you can see details for this program here.

Let’s see the demos. First Tizen in Samsung developer smartphone running Qt 5.1, and the usual Qt5 Cinematic Experience demo, as well as 2 others apps, both super smooth. (via TizenExperts). You can find more information in Qt for Tizen page.

This is not the first time we see Tizen running on Samsung Developer platform, but Qt5.1 is very recent.

The next demo shows Tizen running on an Intel Core i7 Ivy Bridge UltraBook at Tizen Conference 2013 via TizenExperts. The desktop environment is based on GNOME 3 Shell, and beside the HTML5 apps, you’ll be able to run applications such as LibreOffice and Chrome, just like in any other Linux distributions. They also demo Stream in the device, running Team Fortress 2. Finally, they showed Tizen SDK, developing Tizen Apps, and running an OpenGL accelerated smartphone simulator.

Overall, I find the experience feels a little like Ubuntu. Th demo shown above runs the latest Tizen 2.1, but laptop support should be officially part of Tizen 3.0 release.

Jaguar Land Rover, Intel, and the Linux foundation collaborated to create the last demo I’ll show today (via TizenTalk). It’s an in-vehicle infotainment systems (IVI) running Tizen in a Land Rover. It features a standard car interface, support for gstreamer to play audio and video, a demo app store, and a demo GPS positioning system app. The demo is not a product per say, it’s said to be a fully open source demo, so that other people can work on it. You can find the detail on Linux Foundation Automative Grade Linux (AGL) page.

If you’re particularly interested in the work done for “alternative” mobile operating systems with project such as Sailfish, Mer, Tizen, and Qt, on ARM and x86 hardware, you may want to follow @vgrade on twitter.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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