Last year, Samsung teamed up with Intel and the Linux Foundation to develop Tizen, and open-source operating system for mobile devices. Tizen is one of a few new operating systems (including Firefox OS) to compete with Android for the non-iOS smartphone market. Now, it appears that Samsung may have softened on ditching Android in favor of Tizen.Samsung has been working on the Tizen mobile operating system platform along with Intel. In recent past, Samsung was rumored of dropping the development of Tizen based devices. However, now DigiTimes , quoting its sources, said that Samsung has just slowed down the development of Tizen mobile OS and not dropping it entirely.
Samsung's executive vice president, Lee Young Hee had informed Bloomberg that Tizen based smartphones can be expected in August-September this year. These Tizen smartphones will be of high-end category. Now since we are in August, there is no sign of the Tizen-based high-end smartphone from Samsung.
Tizen mobile platform is based on the Linux Kernel and is expected to launch with thousands of Apps . Even if the first Tizen smartphone boasts of mind-blowing specifications, they would be futile without the app eco-system.
Tizen project is being backed by Samsung and Intel together. We can now expect the Tizen devices sometime early 2014.
The delay is reasonable since the planned shift would benefit rivals in the Android camp, including LG Electronics, HTC, Sony Mobile Communications, and Huawei, among others, and so there is no reason for Samsung to push ahead with Tizen at the moment, argued the sources.
Additionally, given that Android has accounted for nearly 80% of the global smartphone market and leads other platforms in terms of popularity, maturity and ecosystem, as well as the fact that Samsung has incorporated Android into its smartphones, tablets, DSCs and notebooks, the possibility is low for Samsung to shift from Android to Tizen overnight barring a drastic overhaul in strategy for Android by Google, the sources commented.
