The Indian market might see a new operating system for smartphones soon, as Japanese telecom major NTT DoCoMo and Samsung Electronics are jointly developing one that will likely be released in Japan and other Southeast Asian countries sometime this year.
According to Japanese daily The Yomiuri Shimbun, the operating system (OS) that DoCoMo, along with other partners such as Vodafone and France Telecom, is developing, is called the ‘Tizen’.
In India, DoCoMo has a presence in the form of Tata DoCoMo, a joint venture which is a cellular service provider on both the GSM and CDMA platforms.
The ‘Tizen’ operating system has been backed by Samsung since last year but has been invariably shelved for various reasons. The report further reveals that Samsung would probably begin selling ‘Tizen’-equipped smartphones sometime this year. The Tizen OS, like Android, is open-source for most part, and is being developed on the premise that cellular service firms will be able to offer their own services, taking a slice away from the value-added services pie dominated by Apple and Google.
