Tizen 2.0 Alpha Is Now Available for Testing

Tizen 2.0 alpha source code and SDK have been made available for testing by the Tizen Association, bringing a huge amount of updates and new features.

When Intel dropped the MeeGo name of their Linux-based operating system and changed it to Tizen, not many people noticed it. MeeGo wasn't doing great and some users even thought that Intel was going to abandon the development of MeeGo completely.

Tizen is an open source mobile operating system based on distribution which includes several modules from the former MeeGo, Moblin, and Maemo. The development is a joint venture, called the Tizen Association, which is made of several companies, such as Intel, Huawei, NEC, Samsung, and few others.

Just like any operating systems, Tizen comes with a huge number of updates and various new features.

Highlights of Tizen 2.0 Alpha:

• The web framework has been enhanced providing better HTML5/W3C API support and more Tizen Device APIs;
• A multi-process Webkit2-based Web Runtime has been implemented providing better security and reliability for Web applications;
• Advanced HTML5 features have been added, such as video subtitles and captions, battery status API, screen orientation API, and many others;
• A new Tizen Device APIs for file transfer, notifications, and power control has been added;
• The IDE & SDK for Web application development has been vastly improved;
• Install manager support for snapshot-based network installation was added;
• Support for OpenGL ES has been enhanced;
• A new platform SDK that helps platform development based on OBS has been added.

A complete list of changes, updates, and new features can be found in the official announcement. The developers are also planning to implement even more components in the coming weeks.

Download Tizen and Tizen SDK 2.0 Alpha right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.