[shadowmint]

"For most Samsung smartphone owners, TouchWiz is Android, and since Tizen could easily get a TouchWiz-like user interface, the average consumer wouldn't notice a thing."

You've got to be kidding.

Do you remember the demo? www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ1y7CpIaVA

Smooth. :/

To be fair, I'm sure they're working on the UI, but UI is something that's hard to get right. It took android what, 4 years to reach a point where it's actually nice to use.

...and you think maybe consumers are just stupid and won't be able to tell the difference between a smooth responsive and well designed UI and a rubbish new UI (as all new UIs are, to start with)?

yeah...

[objclxt]

I am one of the few people who's had the (mis)fortune of developing for Bada, one of Tizen's predecessors.

For a while, I was using a Wave 3, which was basically a nicer Galaxy S2 running Bada (I could never quite understand why Samsung went to the trouble of designing a very nice metal unibody handset and then saddling it with Bada).

People in the office who weren't developers would on occasion pick up the Wave and genuinely believe it was running Android. Samsung had ported TouchWiz over to it, and whilst there were some clearly noticeable differences in terms of performance most people didn't care enough to pick this up. I think you give people too much credit.

All I know is that back then Samsung put a lot of effort in making Bada look, feel, and behave like TouchWiz on Android. I haven't looked at Tizen recently, but I don't see why they wouldn't do the same here.

[defrndr]

True. My brother had a the first Wave and I'll say that, in terms of built quality, it was one of the Samsung's best phone ever. It was built like a tank and had a unique look to it. Bada in itself was not bad, if you could ignore the lack of apps. The OS blatantly copied the best of both iOS and android. A lot of people really did not care, at that time, whether it was Bada or android; they just bought it because it looked good.

[Zigurd]

Android is a lot more than look & feel. In fact Android was pretty homely looking at first. But it was always beautiful on the inside.

Android is apps that share UI, using intent filters that launch Activity objects. Android is a Java VM, including a unique bytecode, and jit and gc, and that's good at multiprocessing, and that's appropriate for battery powered devices.

A lookalike launcher that launches apps written in C++ that can't do what Android apps do is not going to make any headway in the market. In fact it is kind of silly to emulate Android's launcher style. There is nothing, apart from familiarity, that makes it especially good.

Android's app runtime technology has become the de facto client Java technology. Anything that is going to credibly compete has to have something at least as compelling going for it.

[acchow]

The article got another equivalence wrong too - that Google is Android.

> Add all of this together and it becomes clear what Samsung is going for. The company wants to decrease its dependence on Google, and Tizen is the way they're going to do that.

He is conflating independence from Android as independence from Google. How? What will it use for Maps? Search? Email? Wifi-assisted location data? Moving off Android is about as Google-independent as moving off Chrome.

[msabalau]

"TouchWiz is Android" in the same way green paint is the performance by Mila Kunas in "Oz the Great and Powerful".

I'm a very happy owner of a Galaxy Note II, but nearly everything Samsung did on the software side is value subtracting.

(Nearly, but not all: I do like the way I can capture a screenshot by moving my palm across the screen as if I'm a photocopier.)

[mrich]

I find smart stay and the multi windowing very helpful.

[MatthewPhillips]

If you believe that about Android your conclusion doesn't follow; Android and The Galaxy line was selling well before your 4-years-in point of niceness.