India’s first Tizen Developer Summit held in Bengaluru

Close on the heels of Samsung Developer Day 2015 which was held on the 1st of June 2015, Samsung is holding another event for developers in India. This time, for its very own Tizen OS which runs on quite a few of Samsung’s offerings. The Tizen Developer Summit is underway in Bengaluru and is being conducted on 30th and 31st of July 2015. The summit is aimed at developers who’re keen on learning more about Tizen and developing applications for Samsung’s smartphones, wearables, TVs and whatever else Samsung has planned to infuse Tizen with. 

The conference showcased various features for not only developers but also for ISVs, OEMs, hardware and software vendors. Bengaluru being the venue might have been a surprise for the most of us but as we begin to look at the bigger picture around the new ecosystem we start to see the reason as to why Samsung chose Bengaluru for the Tizen Developer Summit. Of the entire developer populace, only one percent are from India but this one percent are highly concentrated towards the mobile platform. In the last one year, Indian developers contributed to 27 percent of the applications published on the Tizen app store. More than 500 Tizen developers are from Bangalore and during the period between January 2015 to July 2015, the Tizen app store saw an increment of 84 percent in terms of applications developed. Needless to say, most of these were to the credit of Indian developers.

Keynotes
Dr. Jason Dongwon Kwak, M.D. Samsung R&D Institute Bengaluru started off the conference by shedding light on what Tizen aims to do in the long run. He was then followed by Dr. Aloknath De, CTO, Samsung India, who highlighted the fact that most of the apps on the Tizen store were developed by Indians and the first smartphone that runs on Tizen, the Samsung Z1 sold over one million units in a period of 6 months. 

Dr. Ajay Kumar, Director-General, NIC and Additional Secretary, Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Ministry of Communications & IT, Government of India then took to the stage to enlighten the audience about the ‘Digital India’ initiative and how open-source projects like Tizen were essential in transforming India.

Other speakers included, Naveen Tewari, CEO of InMobi and Sanjeev Kashyap, CTO and Head of Satellite Network Group at Airtel. InMobi announced the integration of their monetisation platform MIIP with the latest Tizen SDK and Airtel announced Tizen based TVs that did away with STBs all together. 

New Tizen Software Development Kits released
At the summit, new SDKs were released with version 2.3.1 being from the stable branch and version 2.4 for the beta branch. Noteworthy changes to the new SDK include:
 

Tizen 2.3.1

• Wearables integration
• Native apps

Tizen 2.4 Beta

• Dynamic Animation Library (DALi) for 3D applications
• Better optimised for hardware usage and power consumption
• Couldbox Feature – interconnectivity with multiple cloud platforms
• Contextual triggers akin to Google Now

Future versions

• Application portability across mobile devices, wearables, TVs and home appliances

 
Other highlights
As a move towards encouraging more and more developers to start working with Tizen, it was announced that for the first year that an app remains on the Tizen store, all revenues from app sales are given entirely to the developers. 
The next Tizen Developer Conference (TDC) is to be held in Shenzhen, China on September 17-18, 2015. 
All developers in attendance were given Samsung Z3 reference phones which have hardware that is nearly similar to the consumer model of the Samsung Z3. See below for rumoured specifications of the Samsung Z3.

What is Tizen?
Tizen is a three year old operating system based on the Linux kernel and the GNU C Library. The open-source project is based within the Linux foundation and its evolution is controlled by a Technical Steering Group which comprises of Samsung and Intel. With a purpose of providing a consistent user experience across a plethora of devices including smartphones, wearables, tablets, smart TVs, computers, cameras, media players, printers and even home appliances. 

TIzen has already been implemented in a lot of devices since its inception. The Samsung Gear 2, Gear S and Gear 2 Neo run Tizen and even the original Gear which ran Android at the time of launch was shifted to Tizen as the main OS last year. Samsung’s NX200 and NX300 cameras run on Tizen. Not restricted to just entry level cameras, even the high-end mirrorless NX1 shipped with the homegrown OS. Moreover, Tizen being open-source, most of the source code powering these devices have been released. The Samsung’s Z series of smartphones are all based on Tizen. The Samsung Z which had a 4.8-inch AMOLED screen and was powered by a 2.3 GHz quad core processor was launched in Russia last year. 

Closer to home, Samsung introduced the Samsung Z1 in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and India. The phone sold over 500,000 units and has gone on to reportedly become the best selling smartphone in Bangladesh. The Samsung SUHD series of TVs also run on Tizen. We’ve been testing the 65-inch SUHD UA65JS9000K smart TV and early impressions of the OS make it out to be quite impressive.

Samsung Z3 vs Samsung Z1
All developers attending the event were given a reference Samsung Z3 for developing apps. Here’s a short specification comparison between the two phones.

		Samsung Z3	Samsung Z1
NETWORK	Technology	GSM / HSPA / LTE	GSM / HSPA
	2G bands	GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 – SIM 1 & SIM 2	GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 – SIM 1 & SIM 2
	3G Network	HSDPA 900 / 2100	HSDPA 900 / 2100
	4G Network	LTE
	Speed	HSPA	HSPA
	GPRS	Yes	Yes
	EDGE	Yes	Yes
BODY	Dimensions	9 mm thickness	120.4 x 63.2 x 9.7 mm (4.74 x 2.49 x 0.38 in)
	Weight	–	112 g (3.95 oz)
	SIM	Dual SIM	Dual SIM
DISPLAY	Type	PLS TFT capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors	PLS TFT capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
	Size	5.0 inches	4.0 inches (~59.8% screen-to-body ratio)
	Resolution	540 x 960 pixels (TBC) (~220 ppi pixel density)	480 x 800 pixels (~233 ppi pixel density)
	Multitouch	Yes	Yes
PLATFORM	OS	Tizen OS, v3.0	Tizen OS, v2.3
	Chipset	Qualcomm MSM8916 Snapdragon 410	Spreadtrum SC7727S
	CPU	Quad-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A53	Dual-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A7
	GPU	Adreno 306	Mali-400
MEMORY	Card slot	microSD, up to 64 GB	microSD, up to 64 GB
	Internal	8 GB, 1 GB RAM	4 GB, 768 MB RAM
CAMERA	Primary	5 MP, 2592 х 1944 pixels, LED flash	3.15 MP, 2048 x 1536 pixels, LED flash
	Features	Geo-tagging, face detection	Geo-tagging, face detection
	Video	Yes	Yes
	Secondary	2 MP	VGA
SOUND	Alert types	Vibration; MP3, WAV ringtones	Vibration; MP3, WAV ringtones
	Loudspeaker	Yes	Yes
	3.5mm jack	Yes	Yes
COMMS	WLAN	Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Wi-Fi Direct	Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n
	Bluetooth	v4.1, A2DP	v4.1, A2DP
	GPS	Yes, with A-GPS	Yes, with A-GPS
	Infrared port	No	No
	Radio	FM radio	FM radio
	USB	microUSB v2.0	microUSB v2.0
BATTERY		Li-Ion 2000 mAh battery	Li-Ion 1500 mAh battery

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Mithun Mohandas

Mithun Mohandas is an Indian technology journalist with 10 years of experience covering consumer technology. He is currently employed at Digit in the capacity of a Managing Editor. Mithun has a background in Computer Engineering and was an active member of the IEEE during his college days. He has a penchant for digging deep into unravelling what makes a device tick. If there's a transistor in it, Mithun's probably going to rip it apart till he finds it. At Digit, he covers processors, graphics cards, storage media, displays and networking devices aside from anything developer related. As an avid PC gamer, he prefers RTS and FPS titles, and can be quite competitive in a race to the finish line. He only gets consoles for the exclusives. He can be seen playing Valorant, World of Tanks, HITMAN and the occasional Age of Empires or being the voice behind hundreds of Digit videos. View Full Profile