Samsung is moving slow, but it’s fairly certain the company will launch a smartphone running on Tizen later this year, at least in the Indian market. The device will be a low-end phone that will run on Tizen 2.3 out of the box; we’ve already given our readers a look at the Tizen interface, and now, the latest iteration of the OS has been shown off in more detail in screenshots published by Tizen Indonesia.
As you can see in the screenshots on the source link below, Samsung has gone with an extremely colorful look for its in-house OS, with blue being the prominent color in quite a few apps. Everything looks quite similar to the company’s TouchWiz UX on Android while still being different enough to give Tizen an identify of its own.
Taesoon Jun, Samsung’s chief architect on Tizen, said in an interview last week at the company’s developers conference in San Francisco that Tizen is focusing on the low-end and mid-range right now.
Samsung’s efforts behind Tizen are a lot more than just having a backup plan in case its relationship with Google goes south. Tizen will also be used by the company to compete against Chinese and Indian smartphone makers of $100 smartphones. It’s also going to compete against the Android One participants, as hinted at the conference.
As for the upcoming Tizen-powered smartphone, it’s believed to be the Samsung SM-Z130H. According to initial information, it is built around a 5-inch display and packs a Spreadtrum SC7727S SoC with a 1.2 GHz dual-core CPU and ARM Mali-400 GPU clocked at 460 MHz, aided by 512MB of RAM.
We’re looking forward to what Samsung has in store. Let’s just hope that the company’s recent plans to cut down smartphone production by 30% in 2015 won’t affect its Tizen ambitions.
