Tizen OS: Is it a Worthy Smartphone OS Contender?

The smartphone OS league is growing and getting more competitive these days. The ongoing MWC 2013 significantly accelerated the mobile industry's momentum with the introduction of new technologies and devices as major industry players kept on brining in their big guns in today's mobile wars to capture as much as they can of the ever growing mobile market. After Firefox OS, now comes another newcomer, the Tizen OS. The Tizen will compete within the junior league of smartphone OS along with Firefox OS, Ubuntu, Microsoft's Windows Phone and the revamped Blackberry OS. Major league players Android and iOS seems unfazed with all these developments.

Tizen is being spearheaded by power player Samsung Electronics Co., along with fellow handset manufacturer and China's largest Huawei Technologies Ltd. Other major Tizen backers are Intel Corp., and carriers Japan's NTT DoCoMo, France Telecom's Orange and US based Sprint Nextel Corp. Samsung's spokesman Michael Lin said that their company will continue to carry Android phones but will ditch its own Bada OS in favor of Tizen.

Open source phone operating systems like Firefox and Tizen aren't new. The fact that Google's Android is an open source system itself doesn't guarantee that it will also make it big, as one coming from a non-profit organization has never been successful. The Tizen project resides within the non-profit consortium of Linux Foundation. After two failed attempts, Orange's technical director Frederic Dufal said that they have already learned from mistakes of the past.

After Samsung introduced their Tizen 2.0 developer's handset at the MWC for hands-on review, Engadget and CNET reported their initial preview of the new OS. The Tizen phone pretty much look and operate like Android, except for their rounded app icons instead of square. Which coincidentally is the same shape Mozilla chose for their Firefox OS. Tizen can run HTML5 apps natively and according to the Tizen association, thousands of apps have already been developed and ready to go once their handsets are rolled out in the market. Although Japanese telecom NTT DoCoMo says that they will be the first carrier to offer Tizen soon, no word yet has been given on the exact date these phones will come out this year.

Watch the Samsung Tizen 2.0 prototype handset (Galaxy S III?) in action from Engadget and tell us what you think.