Samsung announces their first Tizen OS smartphone

Samsung has previously used Tizen OS, their own operating system in cameras and smartwatches but the Samsung Z is the first attempt of the company of integrating this Linux based software in their smartphones. Through their official electronic blog, Samsung Tomorrow, the technology giant announced the Samsung Z, a smartphone that will run with Tizen OS and that features a 4.8-inch 720p HD AMOLED display. In terms of design, the Z is well built and looks pretty similar to other smartphones produced by Samsung. It has side volume and power buttons, a 2.1 megapixel front camera and 8 megapixel camera and faux leather material rear cover. It counts with 2.3-GHz quad core processor, 2 GB RAM and Bluetooth.

Tizen OS is a flexible program that can be customized and that is based in Linux and if successful, may point that Samsung intends to move away from Android in order to power their smartphones with the OS of their own creation. Over the last few years, the company has worked in developing Tizen. Several tweaks and prototypes later, Samsung finally came up with the Z, which is meant to offer a different user experience and improved speed for the startup. Tizen looks very similar to the Android version used in Google’s mobile OS. You can set “Dynamic Boxes” in the screen, which are essentially customizable widgets. You can add Dynamic boxes by pressing and holding on the screen. It also seems like Tizen would allow you to have up to nine home screens.

In terms of features that stand out, Tizen displays up to 8 of your favourite apps at the bottom of the screen, instead of the usual 4 or 5. You can swipe up on your favourite apps and pull them to the top to show a split screen with the rest of your apps in the background. With Tizen you can also change the interface colour by changing the wallpaper. As well as promoting their fingerprint scanner feature, Samsung claims that Samsung Z is a more secure smartphone. The fact that Tizen is relatively new could contribute to this as it is not as popular as Android or iOS and therefore, not as heavily targeted by malware as these operating systems.

The Samsung Z will be available initially in Russia, before the end of 2014. The rest of the markets would follow later on but it is not clear exactly when or if users in North America and Western Europe would be able to get it. The success or failure of the Samsung Z could determine if the company sticks to Android or if they focus their efforts on making Tizen a worth competitor.

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