Samsung wants Tizen to power cars as well

Samsung has big plans for its Tizen operating system. In an interview with CNET, the company's IT and Mobile Communications Division head JK Shin talked about how Tizen is more than a pet project. Shin says that the OS is a "simple alternative for Android."According to Shin, Samsung wants the OS to run on everything—from smartphones and tablets to watches and even cars. "There are many convergences not only among IT gadgets, including smartphones, tablets, PCs, and cameras, but also among different industries like cars, bio, or banks," he said. "Cross-convergence is the one [area] Samsung can do best since we do have various parts and finished products." Samsung essentially wants to push Tizen out and promote it because it will be an OS that is directly under control of the company. The company earlier tried this with Bada, but we all know how that ended. The company undoubtedly wants to cut off its reliance on Google and its Android operating system. Maybe even toasters? (Image credit: Tizen Project on Flickr) We saw an example of Samsung’s desire to run Tizen on everything back in July when the specs of the reference tablet running on Tizen were leaked. The tablet, dubbed the Tizen Magnolia RD-210, is a reference design running on Tizen OS 2.0.0. It is still in the prototype stage and, as a result, the OS isn't optimised for tablets yet. It will have a 10.1-inch display with a WUXGA resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels, giving it a pixel density of 224 ppi. Under the hood, it's powered by a quad-core processor based on ARM's Cortex-A9 and clocked at 1.4GHz. It will have 2GB of DDR3 RAM, so things should move quite smoothly on the tablet. Storage is handled by 32GB of internal memory and a microSD card slot. The camera seems to be the weakest point of this tablet, with the rear shooter having a 2 megapixel sensor and the front one a 0.3 megapixel camera. Samsung’s Tizen handsets, dubbed Melius and Redwood, were rumoured to be released in August. While there was no real confirmation about it, sources suggest that the phones have been delayed for a couple of months.