Samsung’s new TouchWiz UI for Galaxy S6 may have a touch of Tizen present

Over the years, one complaint that surfaced about Samsung smartphones was the TouchWiz UI that Samsung deployed. While Samsung was always adding in lots of interesting and unique features, critics also felt the interface was becoming too bloated and busy. Samsung took that input and started to trim things back some for the Galaxy Note 4. However, for the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge, it was clear that Samsung was being more aggressive in trimming things down. Many believed a lot of this was due to the influence of Google’s Material Design framework. However, it appears that Samsung also leaned heavily on their work with the Tizen OS, recently employed on the Samsung Galaxy Z1 released in India.

Comparing Tizen OS with the new TouchWiz, some similarities jump out. For instance, the Contacts app is quite different from previous TouchWiz iterations, but it looks very much like the Tizen Contacts app. Colors are more prominent, icons and avatars are round instead of square, and the menus are trimmed down quite a bit. Coincidentally, these changes are similar to what Google calls for with Material Design.

One area that definitely seems to be a crossover from Tizen is the ability to personalize themes, most notably applying a universal color scheme to the interface and even within apps.

Samsung’s UX design team had previously said that their goal with Tizen on the Galaxy Z1 was to create an interface that focused on simplicity, ease and speed. These same buzzwords are popping up from Samsung with regard to TouchWiz now as well.

To get an idea of how similar Samsung’s take on Tizen is, check out the video below that was recently released by Samsung’s developers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

source: Tizen ID
via: G for Games

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