The story of Tizen has been a tumultuous one since its birth last year, but now the MeeGo-based OS is stepping up to the big leagues thanks to a planned merger with Samsung's popular Bada platform.
According to Forbes, Samsung will be merging Bada with Tizen, an offshoot of the MeeGo mobile operating system:
When the integration is finished, Tizen will support mobile applications written with Bada's SDK (software development kit). That support will include backwards compatibility for previously published Bada apps.
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Interestingly, that's almost exactly what MeeGo News' Steve Paine predicted would happen last September, which I pointed out at the time:
A company like Samsung would be the biggest win possible for Intel if they could just convince Samsung to break out a new range of Bada phones, based on a MeeGo core, and Intel hardware with Intel value-add silicon and services.
"MeeGo has been well designed as a smartphone core. How about the Bada brand and [user interface] on a MeeGo core? Remember, MeeGo really is just a core with a UI framework," Paine wrote.
And with the news coming out of Samsung, that appears to be exactly what has happened. The only difference from Paine's prognostications is that MeeGo was transformed into the Tizen Project. Officially, MeeGo and Tizen exist as separate projects, each stewarded by the Linux Foundation. The Samsung-sponsored Tizen is shifting towards HTML5-oriented application, while MeeGo remains focused on native applications.
Even though the two projects do co-exist, Tizen is widely regarded as being the successor of MeeGo.
The planned merger might not seem like a big deal, but it does lend Tizen (and MeeGo before it) quite a bit of street cred in the mobile sector. While many North Americans are not familiar with Bada, the fact is the platform sold better than Windows Phone 7 on the global market last year.
The merger of the two Linux-based operating systems means that all of those Bada developers will now have access to Tizen's interface and HTML5-friendly APIs. It also means that Samsung, one of the world's biggest smartphone manufacturers, will have a powerful and flexible operating system that will fit well on higher- and lower-end devices.
