Samsung has announced it will merge its own touchscreen OS, Bada, with the Linux-based Tizen OS.

Tizen was a collaboration between Intel and Samsung  and was born from the ashes of MeeGo where it failed to rise like a phoenix.  Nokia left it for dead and jumped to Windows Phone. Samsung was a little luckier with Bada in 2010 in an effort to update the operating system on their low-end smartphones and their touchscreen feature phones. The OS has multi-tasking, an app store and a completely rehauled UI that looks somewhat similar to Android.

More than 10 million Bada devices were sold last year, making it a marginal success for the company. Bada will fold into Tizen, but all current apps and the SDK is backward compatible with the new OS. There is a chance that Bada devices, like the Wave phone, will be updated to Tizen later this year via an OTA update.

Samsung says it will launch two Tizen phones in 2012.