The follow-up to last year’s Samsung Galaxy Gear smart watch may not use Android, with Samsung said to be favouring its own Tizen OS.
Sources claim that Samsung will launch the Galaxy Gear 2 alongside a new HTML5 version of Tizen at the Mobile World Congress next week. By leaning on the web standard, it’s hoped that more web developers will contribute apps to the Tizen platform.
That’s the situation according to USA Today, at least. It claims that Samsung wants to avoid enabling Google to take up the same position of strength it now enjoys in the smartphone and tablet markets in the emerging field of smart watches.
Indeed, some feel that Google will take a less open stance with the watch-based version of its OS, rendering the need for an open source alternative all the more apparent.
The open-source Tizen project is being led by Samsung but has the backing of some 36 companies, including a number of high profile network operators. Nevertheless, Tizen has had a difficult start to life. There is still no Tizen device available on the market, despite version 2.0 of the software launching almost exactly a year ago.
The first Samsung Galaxy Gear ran on a version of Google’s Android OS, but received overwhelmingly negative reviews. Still, we found its UI to be reasonably intuitive.
Interestingly, the Samsung Galaxy Gear 2 is expected to form a close partnership with the forthcoming Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphone, which will run on the latest version of the Android OS.
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