Tizen 1.0 Released, Meego Born from the Dead

If you thought Meego died with Nokia’s switch to Windows Phone 7, well, you pronounced the operating system’s demise too soon. Tizen, the open source platform born from the ashes of Meego (which, as a historical sidenote, was an amalgam of Intel’s Moblin platform and Nokia’s Maemo) has now managed to reach its first significant milestone, version 1.0.

Tizen takes a markedly different approach to iOS and Android. Both those platforms are, at their heart, systems on which to run apps. Tizen is a member of a new breed of platforms that eschews traditional app design for an incredibly robust and exceedingly swift HTML5 interpreter capable of pumping out pages as fast as possible. this has the added benefit that any app designed for Tizen can also run on the desktop, though there it won’t get to take advantage of Tizen’s low level API’s.

But the platform might not stay that way. Apparently, Samsung is in talks with the Tizen team to port its Bada operating system to Tizen, bringing with it a full suite of API’s for local code. This would be a major win for Tizen, which hasn’t yet found a manufacturer willing to make a phone running the platform.

It should be noted that while Tizen is seen as the successor to Meego, Meego still exists. Nokia has released at least one device on the platform, and there are rumors that Meego will be the platform they use for low-end smartphones in developing regions. That said, the company doesn’t plan on doing much more development, which is why most of the interest has shifted to Intel and the Tizen platform.

If you want to play around with Tizen yourself to get a feeling for what the platform is like, hit up this link.

ITWorkd Photo by : Tizen developers