Intel is planning its own UI overlay, codenamed "Obsidian," that it will bring to the mobile operating system Tizen and possibly Android, eventually. A source working at Intel has tipped Ars with several early screenshots and some video of Intel's Obsidian project, which includes a handful of unique UI touches.
Tizen, a mobile operating system backed by the Linux Foundation, Samsung, and Intel, has yet to ship on any physical devices. Samsung announced that it plans to launch Tizen devices later this year, mainly in Eastern markets. Intel's Atom chips have also made appearances in a handful of Android phones and tablets, but the company has yet to publicly announce further Tizen devices.
From what we see in the materials passed to us, it's still fairly early days for Obsidian, and it's not quite feature-complete yet. The UI overlay appears to use very boxy, closely-packed icons that mirror the flatter designs of Windows Phone and Android over the skeuomorphism of iOS. Three buttons are persistent along the bottom of the screen (phone, messages, and people), which our source says are not analogs for hardware buttons that come later but are meant to be soft keys.