Another Possible Trial
An executive at an overseas subsidiary of Samsung revealed that a new smartphone running the Tizen operating system (OS) will be rolled out in India. The Tizen OS, a new OS for smartphones, was developed by the Tizen Association, with Samsung and Intel leading the development efforts. But the open source OS is only being used in Samsung's smart watches.
According to the Economic Times on Sept. 22, Tarun Malik, director of the Media Solutions Center of South West Asia at Samsung Electronics, revealed that a new Tizen phone will be introduced to the Indian market this November. The director explained, “The Tizen phone will coexist with Android products in the market.”
He did not reveal the technical specifications of the new model, but overseas IT news site Phone Arena reported that the name of the model is SM-Z130, and its price is set at 12,322 INR (210,000 won or US$202).
This is the fourth time that the launch of a Tizen phone has been announced. At MWC 2013, which was held in Barcelona, Spain in February 2013, the Tizen Association announced that it will debut a Tizen phone in the same year through Orange and NTT DoCoMo. However, the launch was delayed.
Early this year, NTT DoCoMo was planning to showcase a Tizen phone, but also postponed its introduction indefinitely, saying “Currently, the Japanese market is not big enough to support three kinds of mobile OSs.” In July, a Tizen smartphone was reportedly going to be released in Russia, but the introduction was postponed, too.