Tizen gets mentioned mostly in association with Samsung – indeed the company has the only retail-ready devices – but Intel is the other big player. It turns out that the chipmaker has a reference device, codenamed Josephine, and its own UI, called Obsidian.

Samsung leans towards a TouchWiz interface and brought a prototype phone at the MWC. Intel's Obsidian UI is more distinct from Android and features a lot of diamond shapes – for widgets, for icons, even notifications.



Tizen screenshot of Intel's Obsidian UI

Interestingly, the app drawer screenshots reveal a lot of popular apps including Skype, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Netflix and even Google's Drive and Currents. Now, either those are just mockups or Tizen features Android app compatibility a la BlackBerry OS 10 and Jolla.

Anyway, check out this demo video that was uploaded on Tizen Indonesia in June last year. It's probably an old version of the OS and UI, but is still interesting to see.

It seems that shortcuts are square and rotate 45° to attract attention (giving them the diamond shape). Also, Obsidian uses a lot to panels that overlay part of the screen instead of popups or floating apps.

The video quality is too poor to tell if this is Josephine or an Android phone with a custom ROM. Considering the timerframe, it could well be a repurposed droid. Intel has so far refrained from making Intel-branded phones, but this might change with Josephine.

You can also watch this demo of Samsung's prototype device running TouchWizzified Tizen to compare the two different approaches.

Source (in Indonesian) | Via