Samsung has lifted the lid on its plans for Tizen, after Yoon Han-kil, senior vice president of the Korean firm’s product strategy team, said that it will launch smartphones running the Linux-based mobile operating system during its second quarter of business in 2014 — which runs April-July. Tizen-based devices were originally scheduled to go on sale last year, but Yoon admits that the company aborted launches in Europe and Japan “because of poor market conditions”.
The appearance of Tizen on smartphones might have been delayed, but the OS is not dead, according to Samsung, which plans to launch at least two handsets running the operating system within months. Despite the recent decision by Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo to shelve its planned release of a Samsung Tizen smartphone due to “poor market conditions”, Samsung is pressing ahead with the Linux-based platform that it’s been nurturing as an alternative to Google’s Android. “We had tried to launch [Tizen] with DoCoMo and Orange… but couldn’t because of poor market conditions. We have changed our strategy and will release the phones in a few countries where we can do well,” Yoon Han-kil, Samsung’s senior vice president of product strategy, told Reuters.
