Samsung, never one to ignore an operating system, remained active and will direct the combined LiMO-MeeGo effort, now called Tizen, along with Intel. But this is no revival of the Intel/Nokia axis. Samsung tends to keep its hand in with most open operating systems, but we cannot see it putting significant resource behind Tizen.
It will remain involved on the off chance that the OS gains adoption in a particular market – most likely in-car systems, where MeeGo already has presence. But its most serious inhouse efforts center on bada, which it plans to open source next year; it has stepped up its commitment to WP7 in the light of a new licensing deal with Microsoft; and despite the legal attacks by Apple, it remains committed to Android.
The Android Galaxy range is so successful that, unless Apple succeeds in getting it banned on a wide basis, it will remain Samsung‘s primary offering, while it will have WP7 and bada as useful fall-back options – enabling it to pursue its usual policy of creating a hugely diverse product range to appeal to all user bases, and allowing it to feign indifference to Apple‘s threats. Amid all that, there will be little room left for Tizen.
Some observers are more confident about Tizen‘s future, and perhaps even see the OS performing the cross-platform role at Samsung that has also been envisaged for open source bada. Charles Hall of The Online Reporter writes: “Samsung could use the Tizen OS in smartphones, tablets and smart TVs. Such a move would erode Android‘s power in the mobile market because of Samsung‘s design skills and its global marketing might. Intel could bundle Tizen with its low cost, low power Atom processors to help it compete against ARM-designed processors in the mobile, smart consumer devices and automobile industry.”
But for now – at least until the combined release appears at the turn of the year - Tizen is in a similar position to webOS. Its main vendor supporters have pushed it onto the back burner, giving it little hope of making any inroads on Android and iOS, so its chief survival hopes rest on looking beyond phones and tablets. Both platforms are heavily focused on the new cloud world and the “internet of things,” when a vast array of gadgets will feature embedded connectivity, browser and a stripped-down OS. So they could find roles in vertical sectors, or in products which have not previously had an OS, or are off Google‘s radar.
A fully open Linux implementation could be valuable in markets where there is no dominant vendor driven platform. But while that might give Intel some useful influence in the embedded space, where it is starting to push Atom, it is effectively abandoning MeeGo in its primary mobile drive, in smartphones, tablets and ultrabooks – even though the initial statement from Tizen was still stressing consumer devices such as netbooks and smart TVs, rather than the more hopeful hunting grounds of emerging cloud systems.