After being relatively quiet for the last few months, it appears Tizen is gearing up to debut their first set of devices running the OS on February 23rd, 2014, the day before the Mobile World Congress kicks off in Barcelona. An invitation sent out this week informed attendees that they would be offered an “exclusive sneak preview of the newest Tizen devices”, and that both Samsung and Tizen will talk about the major milestones the OS has achieved since last year’s event. While there has been no formal announcement of Samsung’s first Tizen-powered smartphone (originally rumored to be released in 2013, a date that was apparently pushed back by the company’s co-CEO in an effort to further enhance and improve the OS), screenshots leaked this week point pretty definitively at a February 2014 unveiling.

 
Over the last few years Samsung has seen a number of successes with their line of Android phones, but understandably have been looking into an operating system all their own. Enter Tizen - an OS built in collaboration with Intel as a “simple alternative” to Android. SamMobile wrote this week that “Samsung has been rumored to be making Tizen as feature-packed and complete as possible before launch, so don’t be surprised if you see many of the Samsung features you’ve seen on Android on Tizen as well”. After screenshots were leaked this week of the yet-to-be-announced Tizen UI from the Korea Intellectual Property Rights Information Service database, it does look surprisingly familiar to the Android and TouchWiz platforms.

 
The leaked screenshots reveal a fairly TouchWiz-like layout, relying on white backgrounds and colorful foregrounds for a very clean looking OS. Additionally, they show a bevy of preloaded apps, like the Driving Mode and S Beam that have also been seen in Samsung’s Android-powered Galaxy smartphones. Other alleged preloaded applications include basics like Contacts, Calendar, dialer, Messenger and of course, the Notification Toggle Bar. One difference I did note was the shift to a lot of circle icons, a departure from the squared icons used in current OS skins.

 
While there is still no solid confirmation of the upcoming release of the first Tizen smartphone, consumers will hopefully soon be able to get their hands on at least one Tizen-based device. The NX300M Smart Camera, an NFC and Wi-Fi enabled mirrorless camera, is already available in Korea and is in the works to become available to photogs worldwide. Other possible Tizen-powered devices trickling down the rumor mill for release as well in February are smart TV’s and even smart refrigerators.