Samsung Says Fast-Selling Tizen-OS Phones To Be Available Globally

At the ongoing Tizen Developer Conference 2017 in San Francisco, South Korean tech giant Samsung said that its Tizen-OS phones will soon become available globally. The phones would be available in all nations in the world eventually, Samsung says.

Tizen-OS phones debuted in India in 2015, one of the few markers where the gadget is available, according to GSM Arena. Besides India, the device is sold in some African and Southeast Asian countries. The phones are selling briskly and logged a 30 percent increase in sales in 2016 which even further expanded to 100 percent in 2017.

Besides the plan to make available the Tizen-OS phones around the world, Samsung revealed at the event that Tizen 4.0 would expand the platform beyond TV sets and smartphones to applications for Internet of Things. The Seoul-based company demonstrated new products for Tizen 4.0 such as the ARTIK 053 Module, the Samsung Z4 Tizen smartphone, and the lightweight IoT chipset, NDTV reported.

Other than the Tizen-OS phone sales expansion, Samsung says optimizations were made on Tizen 4.0 for the IoT developers to make products other than smartphones and TVs. The products include scales, thermostats, refrigerators, juicers, and bulbs. Hyogen Lee, executive vice president of Visual Display Business of Samsung Electronics, says that since its launch, Tizen has become the operating system for almost all of Samsung products. Besides impressive sales growth, it has become the most successful Linux-based embedded operating system in the world, adds Lee who is also the chair of the Tizen Technical Steering Group.

The Tech Portal notes that the Tizen OS was initially developed for smartphones but Samsung extended its use to the smartwatch ecosystem when it released in 2016 the Gear S3 lineup. Since then, the OS gained more recognition and even surpassed Android Wear when it gained a one percent additional market share in the global smartwatch ecosystem.