One of the selling points of the Tizen OS is that companies can utilise the base Operating System (OS) and design their own User Interface (UI) on top of it. Today it looks like Intel did not want to be left our in this respect (as well as providing processors).
The UI is codenamed “Obsidian” and it is planned to bring it initially to Tizen and possibly Android, google permitting.
An Internal Intel source has provided these early screenshots and video of Intel’s Obsidian project. Their is no mention of how old this footage is.
Video:
The UI overlay appears to use very boxy, closely-packed icons that mirror the flatter designs of Windows Phone and Android over the skeuomorphism of iOS. Three buttons are persistent along the bottom of the screen (phone, messages, and people), which our source says are not analogs for hardware buttons that come later but are meant to be soft keys.
The UI also makes use of a rotation to alert users to notifications. Rather than pop bubbles over an icon, the UI rotates the icon 45 degrees and displays a red notification in the bottom corner to differentiate it from the rest of the apps. The diamond element also crops up to display things like contact info.
These are certainly early days for this project and as Intel has not publicly announced the UI or its release date they have plenty of time to work on it. Perhaps some of this should be taken with a pinch of salt, maybe not, time will tell.
Source Arstechnica
