Global news organization Reuters reported this week that mobile device manufacturer Samsung intends to release a new smartphone based on the Tizen operating system.
Users know Samsung as a company that has long used Google's Android as its platform of choice on its most popular smartphones. The connection between the two is nearly unrecognizable. Now, however, Samsung may be breaking that bond by reaching toward the open source Tizen with its new Samsung Z.
The South Korean manufacturer reportedly said it plans to launch the Samsung Z in the third quarter of this year. That will place the new device in the hands of Russian citizens at some point in the period between July and September. Samsung expects to release the smarphone into other markets following the initial release in Russia, but it has not made clear the specific markets it intends to target. Of course, the company expects to launch the phone in markets where, as a Samsung executive told Reuters, “we can do well.”
A blog post at Laptop Mag reported on the device specifications from the Tizen Developers Conference that took place this week. The Samsung Z should arrive with 4.8-inch, high definition, AMOLED display and will have a fingerprint sensor. It is powered by a 2.3-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor and has 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage with an additional microSD card slot that can bump storage up an additional 64GB.
The Samsung executive that spoke to Reuters about future markets also hinted that the manufacturer expects to eventually release two models of the smartphone, but the specifications of each, at this point, are not clear.
Samsung takes a chance of breaking away from Android with this move to Tizen. Although Android is classified as open source, Google still holds a lot of sway by incentivising developers and manufacturers such as Samsung to not compete with Google's standard apps. Incentives that keep developers from competing with Google do not resonate well when Samsung desires, for instance, to create its own Maps clone. In order to complete a project of that type that stands up to the well-established original, Samsung will undoubtedly need its own platform.
With Tizen, it will have the freedom to create proprietary apps with HTML5 code. That Web standard will also allow third party organizations and individual developers to get on board the Tizen bandwagon. HTML5 is universal among the Web browsers that support it, and it can help create a better connection between users' phones and the Internet as a whole.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle 
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