The Korean company will announce its first Tizen phone next month

Jan 15, 2012 17:30 GMT  ·  By

Shortly after the first screenshots of the Linux-based Tizen operating system for mobile phones, Samsung made a surprising move and announced plans to merge its proprietary bada OS with Tizen.

Tizen is the true successor of the MeeGo platform. Developed by Samsung, Intel and a number of MeeGo developers, Tizen is expected to go live next month at the Mobile World Congress, in Barcelona.

However, starting this year Samsung's bada OS will cease to exist on its own, while its SDK and all apps will be compatible with Tizen platform, claim the folks over at The Verge.

Although Samsung confirmed it will launch one or two Tizen smartphone this year, the handset maker did not say when exactly they will be announced, but all rumors point to a possible MWC 2012 release.

For the time being, Samsung did not mention anything about the current bada smartphones, so there's no telling whether or not some of them will be updated to Tizen OS.