Ars Technica reviews the Samsung Z1, the very first Tizen smartphone. The conclusions are… Well, it’s a piece of crap.
Similar to when Samsung started making modern smartphones, its first swing at building an OS boils down to a lesser copy of the market leader. Tizen is just a less mature version of Android with no apps and no major ecosystem player supporting it. The OS feels like it’s straight out of that Dilbert comic where the Pointy-Haired Boss suggests “If we work day and night, we can match our competitors’ features within twelve months.” Tizen seems to have done a good job copying an OS from several years ago, but it never evolved while its competitors did. For now, the conclusion of any Tizen-based smartphone review will always say “this would have been a better product if it ran Android.”
Tizen: a bland, outdated, pointless operating system nobody is asking for except Apple bloggers.
Just had a look again at the developers section.
https://developer.tizen.org/documentation/mobile-native-app-programm…
So between Tizen 2.2.1 and Tizen 2.3 the APIs were completly changed.
It lost the Bada C++ feeling and now is plain C.
Apparently they value the efforts of the developers that have invested into Tizen already.
Just like Nokia with Maemo and Meego, they went and rewrote the whole native APIs.
The documentation is incomplete, confuse and full of 404 broken links.
No thanks.
Wonder how big the Tizen team is. Must be odd to work there knowing you can basically do anything you feel like in the code. It’s not like it will ever be used for anything serious so might as well throw out the whole UI library between minor point releases. Maybe in 2.4 they’ll switch to GTK.
There is at least Rasterman. He is of Enlightenment fame and his involvement in Tizen at Samsung is well-known for quite a long time.
Tizen switching the UI to EFL is therefore not coming out of a surprise but a long planned move.
It is not an arbitrary decision at all and it was pretty much set in stone when Samsung hired Rasterman to do the job. Which was years ago.
They’re just maintaining a future fallback solution in case Android blows up for legal reasons or whatever.
Yeah, but in this state it’s not ready even for that. A fallback has to be ready to go to be of any use.
Maybe it just needs more time to develop.
Agreed. When Android was announced it was basically a shitty blackberry clone without the apps. And by the time it was released, it was a shitty iphone clone without the apps.
That’s not to say that Tizen will ever be successful, but there is at least one historical similarity – ironically it’s android.
The difference is that when Android came out, everyone and their dog was looking for a way to compete with the iPhone. Sure, Android was not so pretty, but came closest, was affordable to use on your phones, and easy to customize.
Now that Android is on par with iOS and most of Android can still be downloaded as open source from AOSP, and Android has a good ecosystem, there is little reason for anyone to jump ship.
I watched from my beloved Nokia N900 (mostly running GTK) running Maemo 5, to the rumors of Maemo 6, then they had announced that BAM, we’re switching everything over to Qt, Symbian / Maemo are going to use the same stuff mostly and it’ll be easy to port everything, and we’ll have one unified platform!
Thought that was kick ass. Then they said “Hey, we’re going to drop Maemo, team up with Intel and create MeeGo, it’s going to kick ass! But wait… Intel never finishes anything OS related. In fact, I bet they’ve had plans for some operating system or another for 25+ years and still never released one.
Oh, and they’re switching from .deb to .rpms because that’s what Intel’s Moblin uses… I said boo to that, but then Nokia said “hey we’re going to release our next phone as kind of a semi-MeeGo device, still based on .debs! Sweet…
Somewhere in the interim Elop happened, and all their plans went to shit and… then Tizen was pooped out of what was left, and they said “hey, EFL base, you ‘can’ do native apps, but we mostly want html5…” I said Boo… and many moons later Samsung releases poop. Yay?
Tizen isn’t a piece of crap. It is just not as well developed as Android.
If Samsung dropped the price to $25 they would easily sell 10 million a year and get some developer interest.
$25 for what? The battery in most smart phones probably costs more than that X.x
Also I use a ZTE Open C with android… cheapest thing ever but thats only because they shipped it with FirefoxOS which in general isn’t great. Its good for what it is but not great. The main flaw being inability to update easily without a rom flash.
Retail cost and manufacturing cost are totally different things. A phone battery probably costs less than a dollar to make.
The Z1 is made from more or less obsolete components. It is grossly overpriced even at $92. [I can buy a quad core 5″ Alcatel for the same price here in Australia.]
Samsung can easily afford to spend hundreds of millions – even billions – in subsidies to increase the uptake of Tizen.
Edited 2015-02-08 00:43 UTC
Actually I’d go as far to say that Android is a pile of crap
I swear the inconsistency on how you close an application irritates the living shit out of me.
When I look at my mother’s phone, she has a ton of applications open in the task manager, sure they’re ‘paused’ but some of them don’t even do that correctly. Then there’s all the applications that haven’t even been started, but add a daemon so that it can say ‘hey, you can spend more time/money on my app!’
If I could wipe android off of my Note 3 and put Jolla there, I’d be one happy camper, but it’s not there (yet).
Given than C++14 feels better than Java 6, I would rather that they give a first class treatment to the NDK, like iOS and Windows Phone do, but it won’t happen.
I agree, Android is a pile of crap. Lolipop is an improvement in some ways but it’s buggy as hell. Jolla is just not main stream enough. If you don’t want an iPhone, that leaves Windows phone…which is not a pile of crap. Not sure if Samsung can explain to anyone why Tizen should be relevant.
Edited 2015-02-08 13:35 UTC
Windows Phone is crap too, just in other ways. Silly limitations where you look. File I/O? Only asynchronous. OpenGL ES? Microsoft still trying to shove DirectX down everybody’s throat. Other browsers? Why, iOS doesn’t allow it either and we want to be as cool and successful as Apple. Bluetooth input? Not even Microsoft’s own Universal Mobile Keyboard works.
No wonder it is being shunned by users and developers alike.
Closed does not mean crap. IOS is also closed, and it’s far from perfect but not crap. IOS can’t share with all apps and just started supporting alternate keyboards for example. Other browsers on Windows phone? Yes, Opera and there are others. OpenGL, there is the Marmalade SDK for that, but there is nothing wrong with DirectX. Universal Keyboard will be supported in Win 10. It’s not getting developers because of environment issues, hell it has native support in Visual Studio…it’s the small user base and the fact that Windows 10 is around the corner as the reason it’s getting little love from devs at the moment. What is not crap about Windows phone 8.1 is that it’s stable, has good notification system, great sharing system, and excellent in system applications especially for contact management. The tiles interface and alphabetical ordered app list is also way easier to find the app you want to launch over the other systems. Keyboard on Windows phone is definitely not crap and Cortana is not crap. What is crap is Android store continually crashing on my S4 and bugs all over the place. What is crap is IOS lack of notification icons and bad sharing plumbing. What is crap is Lolipop ripping geometric button icons that mean nothing from the Playstation controller!
Edited 2015-02-09 01:09 UTC
True, closed does not necessarily mean crap. But silly limitations mean crap. That some other aspects of the operating system aren’t crap does not preclude it from being crap as a whole.
iOS browser comparison I made because WP8, like iOS, only allows putting a different skin on the built-in browser. Plus iOS users hardly have a reason to switch browsers.
DirectX is a liability. Even though there may be nothing wrong technically with DirectX, it is the biggest roadblock for game developers to bring their OpenGL ES apps to WP. I don’t see how the Marmalade SDK helps here. From developer perspective, that is crap.
Feature XY will work in Win 10… maybe Win 10 will not be crap then. But that doesn’t change the crappiness of WP8 today.
Contact management. Can you have contacts locally on the phone yet or are they still forcefully sync’ed into the Microsoft cloud?
Cortana. LTTP, language support dismal. Not fully sure about WP, but on Xbox it doesn’t even work in Austria while in neighbouring Germany it is supported. Microsoft used to pride themselves in listing the number of languages Windows was released in. What gives?
As bad as this is, its existence says something. Consider too the existence of Jolla, Ubuntu, and Firefox OS for phones. These things are crappy and immature, but they do exist, which is saying something. The trend here is that there WILL be alternatives to android, and they WILL be free.
Jolla actually is pretty mature, they are kind of at the Maemo 7 stage. At least from everything I’ve seen of it. I just wish they’d released a US version of it, as I would have gone with that instead of the Note 3. I even tried to pre-order, got the Jolla shirt too.
Jolla is non-free in the most crucial parts. It is a big step backwards when compared to Android. The whole UI framework is non-free.
Samsung can’t do software. They rose to prominence off the back of Android and then got delusions of grandeur. They got the hump that Android was largely tied to having a Google account so Samsung wanted a phone…..tied to a Samsung account which few people want to use on a Samsung Android phone.
Like Windows Phone there is simply no point to it.
Why does the article make it out to be that Intel isn’t involved ?:
Intel seems to be working on infrastructure, not user-visible parts like UI.
I believe Intel is working on Tizen for things like cars.