Samsung's new Galaxy Gear smart watches have longer battery lives in part thanks to home-grown and customized Tizen operating system.
As Mobile World Congress kicks off in Barcelona Monday, one major question is whether Samsung will abandon Google's Android operating system for the custom Tizen OS, truly tearing apart the most powerful alliance in mobile computing.
The answer turns out to be yes-at least for smart watches.
Less than six months after launching a line of Android-powered watch called Galaxy Gear (see ' Is Samsung's Galaxy Gear the First Truly Smart Watch? ') Samsung today said the next version of the devices will run on Tizen.
It is far less clear, however, whether Samsung's planned 'unpacking' of the Galaxy 5 smartphone Monday evening local time will include such a radical departure; it might be a little odd to steal its own Tizen thunder with a watch announcement. So while Samsung might well be sticking with Android, for now, the smart watch move could be a clear indication that it's only a matter of time before Samsung weans itself from Android on phones and everything else, too.
The Tizen OS has been a pet project of Samsung for years, and is meant to provide an integrated experience across all mobile devices, TVs, and even car entertainment and telematics systems. It grew out of Nokia's MeeGo platform, and is now being developed by an industry consortium led by Samsung and Intel; last year the consortium held a series of developer challenges with incentives totaling $4 million to develop a few thousand apps-and it appears that a third-party platform will also allow tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of Android apps to run on it(see ' Tizen Will Hit the Ground Running with Android Apps.') Yet until today, the only actual commercial gadget available for it was a camera.
What are Samsung's plans? At an event of the Tizen Association today in Barcelona, I had a chance to speak briefly to Jongdeok Choi, the executive vice president and deputy head of Samsung's software R&D center. He wasn't very inclined to reveal company secrets, but did say Tizen is tightly customized for each type of device it runs on. The version that runs on the smartwatch is less code-intensive, helping to provide double or more battery life, compared to previous version. 'We can be made very lightweight so it is very good for wearable devices,' he said. The company is promising that battery life will stretch to two or three days of typical use - where the first version only lasted a day.
He even said that the Tizen OS stood in its own category. 'What are the others? There is nothing to compare it to!' he said. 'It's the core of our principles that it will work across all devices.'
The company says the new Gear gadgets will include a music player, heart monitor, and exercise apps; be compatible with 'dozens' of Samsung devices; and include apps from CNN, BMW, Garmin, Line, and Path. And it moves the camera from the previous version's strap, to the watch face itself. It will be one millimeter thinner and a little bit lighter-but still pretty chunky-looking.
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