Until now, few people would describe Tizen as one of the more visually rich mobile operating systems on the market complete with swirling three dimensional user interface elements. It looked like a mundane early build of Android the last time we saw it, but a video from the recent Tizen Developer Conference shows the OS running HTML5-based apps as smoothly as if they were written in native code. The hardware that the demonstration is being run on has also raised a few eyebrows — it's rumored to be the Galaxy S II HD LTE.

Tizen differentiates itself from iOS and Android by allowing developers to code in HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript rather than Objective-C and Java (which, despite its name, is much different from JavaScript). Samsung and the other companies behind Tizen are hoping to attract developers with shorter development cycles and lower costs by avoiding the idiosyncrasies of native code. Mozilla's Boot to Gecko operates on a similar philosophy, but with the financial power backing Tizen, this could make for an interesting fight outside the typical Android-iOS deathmatch going into 2013.