Kick ass! Ubuntu, Tizen and Firefox all confirmed for 2013. Now, someone confirm a Sailfish/MeeGo phone and I might actually have a choice of new smartphones!
Good timing, too. The charging port on my N900 is finally giving up the ghost.
Chinese electronics firm ZTE is ramping up its efforts in support of the Mozilla Foundation's open source Firefox OS for mobile phones, and if all goes well, it could deliver a device targeting European customers as early as this year. In an interview at the CES 2013 conference taking place in Las Vegas this week, Cheng Lixin …
It's unclear to me if Tizen (or Firefox OS for that matter) is Linux in the sense of a GNU/Linux distribution (like Meego is, and so will Ubuntu on phones, and Sailfish), or just using the Linux kernel (like Android and ChromeOS) - anyone know?
Both Firefox OS and Tizen talk of using HTML5 for their applications - which is great for an open "ecosystem", but in itself isn't very much in common with Meego or other Linux distributions (on Meego, porting an application from Linux was basically just a recompile, just like for any Linux distribution).
They both seem rather similar to ChromeOS in fact (Linux-kernel, open source, using HTML5), but ChromeOS isn't a Linux distribution either.