According to the TizenIndonesia blog, the company’s still missing Tizen smartphone won’t be out anytime soon. The report quotes an unnamed official from Samsung’s Media Solution Center – which deals with all things software related – in Korea, who said, “Previously we planned to release it in the first half of this year in several countries, including Korea and Russia,” before confirming the release had been delayed again.
It’s bad news for the fledgling operating system, which has yet to make a meaningful public debut, and has been beaten to store shelves by rivals Firefox OS and Jolla’s Sailfish OS. With the financial might of Samsung and Intel behind Tizen, we had expected it to be one of the first to go on sale.
News that the Samsung Tizen phone will be a no-show isn’t much of a surprise. Recently, the Japanese network NTT DoCoMo canceled a planned March launch of a Tizen phone, saying it didn’t think there was room for another OS in the country at this time. Now, it could be taken that there was no phone for the network to release even if it wanted to.
The delay hasn’t been officially confirmed by Samsung, but it hasn’t been very vocal about Tizen or its progress in the past, so there’s no reason for it to start now. We’re still expecting to get a demo of Tizen at Mobile World Congress next month, although it’s becoming increasingly likely the OS will only be installed on the ZTE Geek, and not a Samsung-branded device.
So, when will Tizen be out? If the quote above is accurate, it sounds like it won’t be until the second half of 2014 at the earliest. We’re still willing to be surprised by Tizen, and hope it’s still on target for a pre-summer release. However, repeated delays don’t bode well, and force us to wonder why two industry titans can’t fix whatever keeps troubling it.
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