The technical steering group behind the Tizen project—an effort to build a mobile platform with a Linux base—issued a statement yesterday announcing the release of version 1.0, codenamed Larkspur. It offers a number of improvements over the original developer preview that was released in January, including a new simulator for testing Tizen applications on the desktop.

Tizen is a Linux-based mobile platform that is backed by Intel, Samsung, and the Linux Foundation. It is the successor of the MeeGo project, which fell apart when Nokia shifted its platform strategy to focus on Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system. Unlike MeeGo, Tizen isn’t closely aligned with the upstream Linux desktop stack. Instead, its userspace environment is largely built with Web technologies.

Applications for Tizen are mostly constructed with standards-based HTML and JavaScript. The platform’s runtime environment exposes additional functionality through platform-specific JavaScript APIs. The non-standard APIs allow developers to access underlying device hardware and services managed by the operating system. There are modules for messaging, scheduling, Bluetooth, NFC, filesystem access, and geolocation.

The Tizen development stack also offers its own set of HTML-based user interface widgets that can be used to create applications that look and feel consistent with the rest of the platform. This widget set appears to be based largely on jQuery Mobile and uses other jQuery components extensively under the hood.

Although Samsung is standing behind the project, it’s not entirely clear yet how it will fit into the company’s scattershot platform strategy. Samsung also develops its own Linux-based Bada platform, is a leading Android handset vendor, and has built several Windows Phone 7 devices. There are no Tizen-powered devices in the market yet, but that could change now that the platform has reached the 1.0 milestone.