What Happened To Tizen OS?

Samsung has one again delayed the new Tizen OS (a Linux based OS) smartphone which was expected to be released on February 23 right before the Mobile World Congress 2014 in Barcelona. The Tizen OS phone was supposed to be Samsung chance to debut its new custom OS with Samsung hinting at times that Tizen would replace Android and the Samsung App Store would take over from the Google Play Store with apps for Tizen. That seems to be going wrong now as rumors suggest that it will be the Samsung Galaxy S5 rather than the new Tizen OS phone that makes its debut on February 23 during the Mobile World Congress 2014 in Barcelona.

The Tizen OS phone delay was confirmed by a Samsung official at the Samsung Electronics Media Soloution Center in South Korea. The official said, “It is true that the release has been delayed. Previously we did had planned to release in the first half of this year in several countries, including Korea and Russia.” On top of that there was some more worrying news for the future of the Tizen smartphone as the Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo scrapped its plans for a Tizen smartphone launch indefinitely. The expected January 16 would have meant that DoCoMo would have been among the first carriers to carry a Tizen OS smartphone. The carrier didn’t specify what prompted it to abandon the plans but it is likely that the Tizen OS was still buggy and unprepared. The news of a new delay suggest that there is some truth to that.

Samsung is also seemingly aware that the Tizen smartphone will only play well in certain markets. For instance Samsung has no plans to bring the Tizen smartphone to the US. Samsung Director of Product Marketing, Ryan Bidan said, “We don’t feel the U.S. is a great test market for those kinds of products. The U.S. market is pretty mature. Bringing a new entrant here that doesn’t meet a certain performance bar would be a challenge. Recognizing that, we don’t want to set ourselves up for failure.” Of course its worth pointing out that most markets that Tizen smartphone tries to enter it will be the underdog. Android is the dominant OS for some 80% of the smartphone market, presumably with iOS taking up the rest. A new OS like Tizen will be hard pressed to compete. Of course that hasn’t deterred some Tizen die hards who think that Tizen 3.0 with 64-bit processing capabilities, LTE-A (Advanced) can combine with Tizen to compete against Android and iOS. That remains to be seen.