Samsung developer device called Tizen TM1 was distributed among the attendees of Tizen Developer Conference 2015. The conference took place in Shenzhen, China. The schedule offered a lot of interesting talks, including my presentation about building Tizen 3 using the Yocto Project and Openembedded.
Tizen is a Linux based software platform. In the 3rd quarter of 2015 Tizen became the 4th most popular platform on the smartphone market. For the moment it powers Samsung Z1 and Z3. It is also powering Samsung smart TVs and smart watches.
Tizen TM1 is for developers only. It is not for sale. The GSM modem is blocked so you cannot make phone calls. The device is shipped with Tizen version 2.4 beta and a just a few pre installed basic applications. Tizen TM1 is very convenient for both application and platform developers as it can be easily flashed with newer version of the OS.
The user experience is not that different from Samsung smartphones with Android. There is menu that you can activate by swiping from top to bottom and quickly adjust some settings like the location, WiFi, Bluetooth and so on. With a few clicks you can edit or add new widgets to the home screen. It is also possible to easily change the wallpaper.
As I have already said Tizen TM1 is for developers only so it has just a few basic apps. The settings application offers a lot of options for customization and fine tuning of the device. On the about screen you can see the name of the device and the exact software version. The user can select his preferred option for unlocking the screen.
The device does not have an impressive hardware but despite this it makes decent photos. The camera application provides a few build in filters. Of course it is also possible to record videos.
The default Internet browser has a good support of HTML5. It scores 440 points on html5test.com. As you probably know Tizen 2.4 for smartphones supports both web and native application development. Developers can build standalone applications using HTML5 and JavaScript or if they prefer the C and C++ programming languages they can use EFL. It is also possible to combine both technologies and to build hybrid apps.
