Samsung’s internally developped bada mobile operating system is is being merged with the recently announced Intel-backed Tizen operating system. Tae-Jin Kang, Senior Vice President of Samsung’s Contents Planning Team, indicated during CES that “We have an effort that will merge bada and Tizen.” Once completed, Tizen promises to be fully backwards compatible with bada. Both bada and Tizen developers will also be given the same development tools, including SDKs and APIs.
Intel announced Tizen this past September. Samsung had been announced as a lead development partner. The project incorporates technologies from the MeeGo platform and is also supported by the Linux Foundation and LiMo Foundation.
Kang adds that bada could still be deployed in a number of lower-powered phones but he also expects “at least one to two” Tizen-powered Samsung devices to be launched this year. While “Tizen will not become Samsung’s main operating platform anytime soon,” it could eventually power a lot more devices.
While bada has had limited exposure in North America (both Bell and Rogers offered the Wave back in 2010), it still managed to make up about 2% of the global smartphone market in 2011. This put it above Microsoft’s Windows Phone.
Read more: Forbes