Expansion of Tizen
According to industry sources on Nov. 16, the Samsung Z3 Tizen smartphone ranked fourth in the world’s top 10 trending phones chart of week 46, or the second week of November. The ranking is released by foreign press, including GSMArena.com, every week. The announcement came three weeks after Samsung started selling the Z3 in India on Oct. 21. Foreign press comprehensively gather consumer search inquiries and news, and select the top 10 trending smartphones of the week.
The Z3 Tizen smartphone ranked among the top 10 less than a month after the launch. This compares with the fact that the company’s first Tizen smartphone and previous model, the Z1, made the top 10 in the chart for a while a month and a half after the launch. Samsung sold more than one million of the Z1 handsets in India so far, but it was an experimental model. The Z3, however, dramatically improved its functions and maintained a low price of some 150,000 won (US$128), raising its competitiveness.
There is much attention being paid to whether the Tizen-powered Z3 will help spread the Tizen operating system (OS). Earlier, U.S.-based market research firm Strategy Analytics said that for the first time, Tizen surpassed BlackBerry OS for fourth place in the global OS market in the third quarter. As the Z3 is expected to greatly expand the markets to not only emerging countries, including India and Bangladesh, but also Russia and Europe, it will lead to the spread of Tizen OS, which shows an upward trend.
However, industry watchers say that it is urgent to immediately increase the number of applications that are available in Tizen-powered smartphones, in a bid to expand the Tizen ecosystem. There are only 1,000 apps registered in the Tizen app store. The figure falls far short of the 1.4 million apps on Google and 1.2 million apps on Apple. Therefore, the company needs to develop apps that are suitable to use in the released countries.