New Tizen 4.0 OS Under Development
Samsung has begun accelerated development on a new version of the Tizen Operating System (OS), version 4.0, and will be developed for mobile devices, wearable tech, smart home gadgets, IoT, smart TV and beyond.
In November 2016, Samsung announced a partnership with Microsoft that would bring Visual Studio tools .NET to Tizen and also with it Xamarin.Forms. Today, we have seen the release of the second developer preview of Tizen .NET, which included support for Tizen TV. The framework will allow C# developers to easily create and port apps to the Tizen platform.
The Operating System has been mainly productized by Samsung at the moment, but being an Open Source Linux based OS anyone can take the code and develop products with it. The main devices with Tizen are smartphones, such as the Samsung Z1, Z2 and Z3, Samsung TVs and Samsung Smartwatches. The OS is also sprinkled through the smart home offerings such as Robot Vacuum cleaners, washing machines and air conditioners.
Tizen 4.0 Published OS Road Map
According to the roadmap, we will see the release of the third developer preview of Tizen .NET next month. Tizen 4.0 Beta will release June 2017, with the final release date for Tizen 4.0 to be September 2017, and it will have final .NET integrated in it.
Tizen 4.0 is said to have richer features and be faster than Tizen 3.0, but we haven’t received all the specific feature list and Integrated software technologies at the moment to comment. Tizen 3.0 is currently available to developers via Tizen Studio 1.1.0.
Tizen 4.0 Products
At the moment Tizen smartphones are mainly running Tizen 2.4, with wearables sporting Tizen 2.3.2. We have no news at the moment if products already in the market will get updated to a particular version or if there is an upgrade path in place. We’ve been asked this many times today already. Hopefully, we will be able to track down what the architecture differences between the different versions and make some ‘informed’ conclusions.
Samsung have said that 2017 will see new Tizen smartphone(s) being released and it would make sense for it to ship with Tizen 3.0, as apps can currently be targeted for that OS, but we probably wouldn’t see a Tizen 4.0 upgrade for it until next year. Tizen home and IoT products will start being shipped with the latest version shortly after the September date release date, but there will be no need to upgrade devices that are already in the market.
