Samsung to roll Bada smartphone OS into Tizen

Samsung is to merge its Bada smartphone operating system with the Intel-sponsored Tizen, according to reports.

Bada is Samsung's low-end smartphone OS, providing a homegrown counterpart to Android and Windows Phone in the company's portfolio. Both it and Tizen — a partial derivative of the doomed MeeGo — are Linux-based.

According to a Forbes report on Friday, work on folding Bada into Tizen is already underway, with Samsung working on backward-compatibility for existing Bada apps. The company intends to release one or two Tizen devices this year.

Samsung hopes to make it easy for Bada developers to write Tizen apps, the article stated. Since it was launched in early 2010, Bada has been successful in non-Western markets. MeeGo, launched around the same time as a collaboration between Nokia and Intel, was less successful.

MeeGo only ever found its way into one handset, Nokia's N9, before falling victim to Nokia's big switch to Windows Phone in 2011.

Intel failed to find a new partner for MeeGo, which also works in tablets and netbooks, and last September the OS fused with the LiMo Foundation's middleware system to become Tizen. Tizen is run under the auspices of the Linux Foundation.