Tizen - Moblin, Maemo, MeeGo and SLP (LiMo)

TechnoKid

Tizen is the new, new, new, new mobile OS that Intel has released with Samsung.

A Brief History

Originally, Intel had Moblin (Mobile Linux). This was based on the Intel Atom processors for Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), netbooks, nettops and embedded devices. This has little traction and was developed at a glaciar pace. At the same time, Nokia had Maemo. It is not open source though it did contain some. Neither creating traction, it was decided to merge the two into MeeGo. MeeGo was a open source operating system developed by Nokia and Intel. It's first debut on a consumer phone was the Nokia N9 (Running MeeGo Harmattan), praised for it's sleekness and design both in hardware and software. On the same day, Nokia announced it was "dropping" or discontinuing MeeGo development and using Windows 7. A few months later, Intel decided it would like to create another OS with another major player. Samsung. Samsung already had prior experience in mobile operating systems with SLP (what LiMo was connected to) and Bada . Bada will still be continued but SLP (LiMo) and MeeGo have merged.

Any thoughts?

Odaise Gaelach

I'm not sure what to think. There doesn't seem to be much information on it, especially for consumers. No UI screenshots or anything. So I'm not going to get excited about it just yet...

TechnoKid

True. I hope it's similar to MeeGo Harmattan.

KrisW

It will look nothing like Harmattan... except in the way that Samsung's TouchWiz looks like iOS, maybe. Actually, if you look at Bada and TouchWiz, and that'll be a good indication.

The Nokia N9 is not MeeGo; it can run MeeGo applications, but they need to be repackaged first, and that's as far as it goes. Everything that's cool about N9 is a result of Nokia's in-house applications work. Qt is the reason that MeeGo apps look so slick, but Qt is being deprecated in Tizen in favour of HTML5, which is not up to the task (I use both HTML5 and Qt, and there's no comparison in terms of CPU usage and smoothness).

The problem with MeeGo was primarily an Intel Atom OS, and there is no Atom-based mobile phone platform that's suitable for use in phones. This is why N9 is on last year's ARM-based TI OMAP hardware - it's the latest ARM platform that Nokia's Maemo supported

You hear a lot about how Nokia broke up MeeGo, but there are two sides to every story. Intel delayed, delayed, and finally under-delivered on their end of the bargain, which was the hardware. The tablet OS was nice, but without a decent, cheap hardware platform, nobody wanted to use MeeGo.

The sad thing about this whole thing was that it held up Linux on mobiles. Maemo was a very good ARM-based mobile Linux, and the work done by Nokia helped a lot in getting full Linux systems working well on ARM. Moblin looked like being a good choice for Atom netbooks and tablets. By combining them, and then focusing on Intel hardware in an area (mobiles and tablets) where Intel's offerings are very weak, they ended up with something that was just no good for anything.

TechnoKid

Tizen Summit : First Previews?

http://www.tizenexperts.com/2011/10/tizen-summit-2011-beijing-china/

Nokia's work with QT was amazing... pity it won't live on.