Mobile OS Tizen 2.0 moves to Alpha

The source code for Tizen 2.0, the Linux Foundation's mobile Linux project, has been released along with an updated SDK. A blog post encourages developers to start working with the new features of the HTML5-oriented mobile OS.

The project has been relatively quiet since the May release of Tizen 1.0 and, as yet, there are still no phones announced that will be running the operating system. Tizen is one of the three open source mobile operating systems currently in development awaiting a commercial device to be deployed on; the others are Mozilla's FirefoxOS and HP's recently open sourced Open WebOS.

Among the new features of Tizen 2.0 are a Webkit2-based web framework which uses multiple processes to improve security and reliability, support for HTML5 features such as video subtitling, battery status and screen orientation, and new device APIs for file transfer, notifications and power control. The SDK has also been enhanced with snapshot-based network installation in the install manager and better OpenGL ES support.

The release notes give further details of changes such as updated jQuery versions, bug fixes and new core system features such as a world clock, refreshed GUI, IMAP folder management in the mail client and new modem plugins for the telephony management. The SDK and Install Manager are available to download for Ubuntu Linux (11.04 or 11.10, 32- or 64-bit), Windows XP (32-bit only) and Windows 7 (32- or 64-bit) and include a Tizen emulator. The licensing for Tizen is still a mixed combination of various open source licences for the operating system and a Samsung proprietary licence for the SDK and various parts of the documentation.

(djwm)