Samsung's Tizen drives cars, cameras as well as phones

Mobile Phones

Android-rivalling Tizen software will drive cars and cameras as well as smart phones. The new operating system is already on one camera and is set to hit the road with Toyota, Jaguar and Land Rover.

Tizen is a new operating system championed by Samsung and Intel and designed to run all kinds of gadgets. ET News reports from a developer conference in Korea that Samsung is talking to car manufacturers to set the wheels in motion for a Tizen-based In-Vehicle-Infotainment (IVI) system.

And as well as cars and cameras and smart phones, Tizen will power televisions, wearable devices and fridges.

Android has got the world of smart phones sewn up, but the Internet of Things -- connected cars, cameras, wearables and household appliances -- is still a level playing field. So it makes sense for Samsung to make Tizen more than a phone operating system.

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Tizen is actually out there already, powering the Samsung NX300M camera that recently launched in Korea, a successor to the excellent NX300 -- itself the winner of a coveted CNET Editors' Choice Award.

Tizen Lite

The goal of Tizen is scalability: it will work on different scales, from high-end intensive computing to low-end, low-power tasks. The low-end version is called Tizen Mobile Lite, which works on a phone with just 256 MB RAM, and 512 MB ROM. It shows off on low-resolution HVGA (480×320 pixels) and QVGA (320x240) screens -- all specs that will keep the price way, way, way down.

The two types of Tizen are reported by The Handheld Blog. Full-size Tizen requires 512MB of RAM and 1GB of ROM, and it works on high definition screens.

One of the first devices powered by Tizen is a 10.1-inch tablet built by Systena, aimed at developers to fashion apps for the new OS. That's a high-end device, sporting a 1,920x1,200 resolution with a 1.4GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor and 2GB of RAM.

Is Samsung onto a winner with Tizen? Would an operating system influence you when you're buying a car? Spin your wheels in the comments or head out on the highway to our Facebook wall.