World’s first Tizen tablet?
Jun 27, 2013 | Eric Brown
Japanese firm Systena Corp. announced the first Tizen-based tablet, which also appears to be the first Tizen product of any kind. The unnamed Systena Tizen tablet offers high-end features including a 1.4GHz, quad-core Cortex-A9 system-on-chip, 2GB of RAM, and a 10.1-inch, 1920 x 1200-pixel display.
The Systena tablet offers robust specs that come close to matching the most powerful Android tablets currently on the market. The slate incorporates an unnamed 1.4GHz, quad-core Cortex-A9 processor along with 2GB of DDR3 RAM and 32GB of flash. The 10.1-inch display offers impressive 1920 x 1200-pixel resolution. Additional listed features include WiFi, a microSD slot, and a 2-megapixel rear-facing camera, as well as a 0.3-megapixel front-facing camera.
Systena’s 10-inch Tizen tablet
(click image to enlarge)
Japanese carrier and major Tizen backer NTT DoCoMo will sell the device, according to a report by TizenExperts. Last month at the Tizen Developers Conference, NTT DoCoMo and Orange promised Tizen smartphone launches in 2013, presumably using upcoming Samsung Tizen phones, but mentioned nothing about tablets.
 Tizen tablet PR (click to enlarge) |
In its Japanese news release (pictured at right, click to enlarge), Systena notes potential Tizen-based in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) applications for the device.
As far as we can see, this is not only the first Tizen tablet to be announced but the first formal announcement of any Tizen-based product. At the May conference, Samsung vowed to unveil its first Tizen phone “very soon,” but all we’ve seen so far are leaked images of Samsung GT-I8805 and GT-I8800 smartphones running Tizen 2.1 on a Cortex-A9 processor. One report indicated a middling 1280 x 720 resolution display and LTE support, but no other details were supplied. This month, the phones reappeared on the Samsung test center website.
The rumor mill has suggested that HTC, Asus, and Acer are also planning or considering Tizen devices, but the only other vendor to promise one is Huawei, which offered no details. Tizen’s viability on tablets emerged earlier this month when Tizen developer Arnaud Dupuis posted a video demo of Tizen running on the Android-based Nexus 7 tablet.
It will be interesting to see if any Intel Atom or Haswell (4th Generation Core) Tizen tablets emerge this fall. An unnamed staffer at Intel — the major corporate backer of Tizen along with Samsung — recently leaked images of a home-grown smartphone UI overlay for Tizen called “Obsidian”. At the Tizen conference, Intel demonstrated the upcoming Tizen 3.0 running on a laptop with the help of a GNOME shell.
Further information on the groundbreaking 10-inch Systena Tizen tablet should eventually appear on Systena’s website. (Note: Systena Corp. seems to be a subsidiary of, or in some other manner related to, Shisutena Ltd.)
A short introduction to Tizen appears in the box below. Other Tizen-related stories appear in the Related Posts list below the box.
Basically, Tizen is a cross-architecture, open source software platform based on a comprehensive standards-based HTML5 implementation that was designed to support multiple device segments, including the smartphone, tablet, smart TV, netbook, and in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) markets. To achieve this cross-platform flexibility, Tizen uses HTML5 as the main focus for application development, allowing developers to maintain a single codebase. The Tizen platform supports Web applications (HTML, Javascript, CSS) and provides a rich set of services that include an application framework plus content, location, messaging, multimedia, network, social, and system services. Slides from the Tizen Architecture talk at the May 2012 Tizen Developer Conference are available here (pdf file). For further details on Tizen, visit the Tizen project website. |
It’s barely based on meego at all, MeR/Nemo (& by extension Sailfish) is far more heavily based on meego.
This is a common (annoying) misconception, because of the way Tizen was born out of the ashes of the meego project.
I’d say it isn’t based on Meego at all
I’ve no doubt there’s some esoteric code that it shares in common thanks to up-streaming.
Some of the “glue” at the the lower layers, mostly to help with their “native support”.
But yes, overwhelmingly it’s not based on MeeGo…
Fair points, condensing a bit too much there, although I did at least list MeeGo second. In the past, as for example in an earlier Tizen story linked to from this tablet story I made it clear that it has far less MeeGo code than Sailfish. We will delete the offending paragraph.
Please don’t delete anything. If you need to make a change, strikethrough the offending text.
Thanks for the feedback! I’ve removed the previous condensed description of Tizen and substituted our standard “About Tizen” box. For those who are interested, here is the removed text:
Based on a combination of LiMo, MeeGo, and to a much lesser extent Samsung’s Bada, the Tizen is focused on HTML5, but unlike Firefox OS, is not entirely dependent on it. Tizen also offers a native application layer, in addition to supporting development via HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. The open source Tizen.org project is hosted by the Linux Foundation.I wanted a Bada tablet, but one never appeared. I bet this will not make it to the UK either.
Un-named A9 Quad Core 1.4 processor seems like a RK3188. The RK3188 is usually paired with a Mail400 graphics chip. Allwinner makes a similar A7 chip called the A31 paired with PowerVR graphics
http://liliputing.com/2013/06/rockchip-globalfoundries-ramp-up-rk3188-rk3168-chip-production.html.
And?
To create a market for another operating system like this there needs to be a compelling experience or tie in.
Tablet prices are low and dropping fast. Can’t justify competing on price.
iOS has over a billion apps. Android has hundreds of thousands. Can’t compete on software (ask Microsoft).
There’s no obvious tie in (like blackberry had with the playbook and existing blackberry users).
Can’t see why they’re bothering, to be honest.
Tired, very tired & old argument….
It’ll be proven completely & utterly dumb in time, join that queue of dumbness, it’s befitting.