Wednesday 9 May 2012

First Tizen developer phone makes a public appearance

 As Android and iOS duke it out for smartphone OS supremacy, RIM and Microsoft continue refining their own mobile offerings in the hopes of making up some ground before the year is out. HP, meanwhile, steadily works away on Open webOS. And what about Tizen? Well, they’re talking things over at the 2012 Tizen Developer Conference right now — and several presenters have brought along the first Tizen developer smartphone we’ve seen, courtesy of Samsung.

Like the recent BlackBerry 10 device shown by RIM, this isn’t a model that will ever be made available for sale to the public. That’s probably a good thing, because there’s a pretty good chance that someone in Cupertino won’t like what they see in the image above. The single, round home button nestled inside a thick bottom bezel, similarly-rounded corners, and thin, slotted speaker with an adjacent front-facing camera are all very iPhone-esque design elements.

What, excatly, are Tizen partners working with here? The phone is powered by a dual-core 1.2GHz processor (no mention of whether it’s Samsung’s own Exynos). It’s got a 4.3-inch display that runs at 1024×720 resolution, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support, and both front and rear-facing cameras.

 
The Tizen build that’s been shipped on this device is still very rough around the edges, and far from feature-complete. There’s no camera app, for example, but it’s far enough along that you can see several UI elements that Samsung has carried over from its work on both Bada and TouchWiz. It also boasts a web browser with the highest HTML5 Test score to date — around 423 out of a possible 500.


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