Samsung may sell more Android smartphones than any other company, but the folks at the Korean consumer electronics giant are hedging their bets. They’re one of the top backers of the new open source Tizen operating system, which is based on Linux and which is designed to run apps written using web technologies such as JavaScript and HTML5.

Now it looks like Sasmung could finally be ready to launch its first Tizen-based phones soon. The bloggers at Tizen Indonesia say “industry sources” say the first devices will hit five countries this fall.

Tizen 2.0 alpha

First on the list appear to be the US, China, Russia, France, and Japan.

Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo had already announced plans to launch a Tizen smartphone called the Samsung Samuarai  in the second half of 2013. I suspect the phone might have a different name if the same hardware is sold in different countries.

This won’t be Samsung’s first foray into a smartphone operating system that’s not operated by Google. The company offered its own Bada OS for a few years, but has since taken the core components of Bada and added them to the Tizen project.

It’s unlikely that Tizen will support a billion third party apps on day one, or have some of the other features that make Android attractive. But there’s one key feature that could make Tizen attractive to Samsung and wireless carriers: they have far more control over the OS than they do with Android, which is developed and controlled pretty tightly by Google.

Sure, Android is open source, but it’s largely developed behind closed doors and the source code is only released to manufacturers and to the public when Google’s good and ready. The source code for Android 3.0, for instance, wasn’t made public until after Android 4.0 was released. Google also requires device makers to meet certain requirements before it’ll allow them to use some of Android’s key software that’s not open source, including the Google Play Store, Gmail, and Google Maps apps.

via SamMobile

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5 replies on “First Tizen smartphones coming in October?”

  1. I get why Samsung wants tizen, they want control, what I don’t know is why an end user would want tizen? Much less an average joe.

    1. Agreed.

      Unless they are doing something truly unique I haven’t heard about. . . I’m not seeing the enticement. At least with BB 10 I can see QNX’s potential.

    2. I wonder if they think they can leverage their name brand and get (uninformed) people to purchase these phones. They will have to be cheap too, but I think Firefox OS already has the ultra cheap ($80 no contract) covered. I really expect Tizen to fizzle…unless Samsung has something up their sleeve we are not expecting.

    3. If Tizen is like WebOS in it’s ability to patch the OS, that would be a huge reason. With small file patches you could change major features of the UI and the OS itself. It gave an incredible amount of control to the user over the system.

      1. Yes, being open source and officially backed by the Linux Foundation helps… The flexibility could help in adapting it to more devices more quickly than Android can be…
        along with greater range of customization and a heavy push for HTML5…

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