COMMENTARY | You may not have heard of them, since they're not available in the United States. But Samsung sells smartphones that are made using Bada, a home-grown operating system made by the Korean tech giant. It's designed to be simpler than Android or iOS, and to work on low-end phones that Samsung can upsell traditional featurephone customers on.
Tizen, meanwhile, is a project by Intel, which merges the previous LiMo (or Linux Mobile) efforts with MeeGo, the OS developed by Nokia before its partnership with Microsoft. Tizen is a reference design, which does not actually exist on any devices that are available for sale yet, although one MeeGo smartphone was made by Nokia before the company abandoned it.
Elizabeth Woyke of Forbes magazine reports that Samsung is trying to "merge" Bada and Tizen. The two operating systems will be sold on separate smartphones, but Tizen will be compatible with Bada apps, and developers will use the same tools to write apps for both platforms.
Why is Samsung doing this?
First, because putting all its eggs in the Android basket is starting to worry Samsung's execs. The South Korean government had already been trying to create an open-source operating system of its own, to give companies like LG and Samsung a solid foundation against global competitors. Samsung was dismissive at first, according to Yonhap News Agency, but changed its mind once Google announced its plans to buy Samsung competitor Motorola.
And second, because wireless carriers like Verizon demand that manufacturers' devices be different in some noticeable way, from each other and from competing carriers' smartphones. Although this may apply more to the South Korean market, where Bada phones are sold today.
Why isn't it going to help Samsung?
In some ways, it will. Tizen has more potential than Bada in the long run, so making Bada apps compatible with Tizen will let Bada smartphone owners upgrade painlessly.
Neither OS has much traction in the wider marketplace, though. And there's a reason that Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com turned to Android for their e-reader tablets: Android's programming code is open-source too, and is available for free on the web.
Instead of creating their own OS from scratch, and then trying to make its apps work on another OS, they let Google do most of the heavy lifting and then wrote their customizations on top of that. Because of this, Android developers could bring their apps to both the Nook and the Kindle Fire with minimal trouble, and both companies only have to keep track of their customizations instead of the whole OS' code base.
Samsung's already proficient at copying others, especially Apple. This may be one area where a copy would've done it more good, especially when it's the biggest Android smartphone vendor already.
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