While Samsung has managed to bring Tizen to market with its latest Gear smartwatches, its attempts to do the same with a smartphone have been mired in delays. These seemed to finally be at an end when it announced in early June that the Tizen-powered Samsung Z would launch in Russia in the third quarter. A launch event was even scheduled for earlier this month but was unexpectedly canceled only days before it was set to take place.
In a statement today, Samsung explained that it needed to “further enhance [the] Tizen ecosystem,” suggesting that it has failed to attract enough developers to the new platform to build the ecosystem necessary to ensure that the platform can be successful. The statement did not provide any details as to if and when the Samsung Z or any other Tizen-powered smartphones for that matter would launch.
For his part, Russian blogger Eldar Murtazin expects that the Samsung Z will never see the light of day. “Today again about Samsung Z on Tizen remember? There are no delays. This product will never happen. Canceled it,” reads a portion of a tweet originally published in Russian.
Samsung has been trying to bring Tizen smartphones to market for a number of years. The move is widely seen as its attempt to reduce its dependency on Android, especially as Google begins to exert more control over its mobile operating system platform. The fact that the two companies recently signed a new 10-year global patent cross-license agreement may be a sign that Samsung has realized that it needs Google as much as Google needs it.
Sources : The Wall Street Journal // @eldarmurtazin