Gadgetory

hello I'm the west way for Cena to at mobile world congress in barcelona we're going to take a look at Tizen OS a new operating system backed by Samsung we're looking at it running on a samsung prototype device this operating system wants to go head-to-head with Android so let's take a look at what the interface is like all right so this is the home screen of Tizen bear in mind this is a very early version of the operating system so all of this is subject to change but you can see you have your apps arranged on the home screen as opposed to Android there is no normal home screen that you fill with widgets and then a separate app tray the app tray is the home screen if you like so if I dive into some of these you can see if I go into my files for example you can see how the basic layout works so in the bottom right you have a back button which is quite similar to how Android works while over on the left you get this context sensitive menu which will display different things depending on what you're looking at so if I pop into the camera and have a look there you can see I've got the options to create folder for example or hide the file extensions at the moment we're using a samsung prototype device but you take a look on the back you can see the Samsung branding there but we don't really know anything about the the hardware of this device itself and again obviously it's not final if you press the home button currently that takes you back to the home screen now if you swipe down from the top that brings you a notifications page it's a little bit slow again this is still early stuff so this is a this is quite different from the way Android works because instead of sweeping down over the top of the screen it pushes apps out of the way but on this notification screen you do have an impressive number of options so I like that you can turn the brightness up or down very conveniently and it's got a battery indicator there as well there's also a shortcut to the settings menu in the top right corner if we go into the settings you can see the version that we're using the model is just called reference device in the version is Tizen 2 point 0 point 0 one thing I do like about this settings menu that I think is possibly a little neater than Android is that at the bottom there's a frequently used button so if you tap this you will see the settings that you most often go to so things like Wi-Fi or location that is quite a good idea because I for one I'm always fiddling around in settings menus trying to find the thing that I want from a long list so it's quite handy to be able to quickly jump to the things that I'm usually looking for let's take a look at the camera as you can see on screen here it says if you tap and hold the camera button then you can take a burst shot so if i press like that it's taking some bird shots along the bottom there that is quite a lot I think that was 20 photos in roughly a second and now it's processing all of them if you tap on the bottom e you get more options such as some editing you can crop rotate left and right set a slideshow you can see the details which is quite in-depth as you can see things like the ISO and exposure time and you can also add tags which should help you organize your photos more camera options in the top right you've got settings for the flash and in the top left you've got general camera settings this is the phone app no real surprises here it's very similar to what you would get an android keep as contacts key logs jumping out of that and into the browser typing on the phone feels quite comfortable this on-screen keyboard will be very familiar to anyone who has used android or even the iphone no real surprises there obviously this is all prototype but the browser does feel quite slick zooming in and out seems very smooth so that is promising we're in the gallery now something that's a little unusual is if you tap an image you zoom in using this slider on the bottom if I try and pinch to zoom you can't do that double tapping doesn't do anything either you can scroll around the image but if you want to zoom in and out of it you have to use this bar so obviously very rough around the edges quite far from being finished but it seems like Tizen has a couple of good ideas that I'm interested in seeing more of will it be enough day to take on the likes of Android i'm not sure i'm luke westaway for cnet and that was a quick look at Tizen OS