In an interview with Wall Street Journal, Samsung’s global head of mobile J. K. Shin revealed that Samsung will be releasing a Tizen based device in third quarter of 2013. Tizen has been in development for the last one year and much has been said and rumoured of it, including a rumour of a Japan unveil in first quarter.
Samsung is also in the process of merging the lightweight in-house OS BADA with Tizen and pick the good features off it to feed into Tizen. This will make Tizen a well-rounded OS for smartphones and smart home devices that will have taken enough time to develop and mature before launch. Samsung has had developers seeded with Tizen developer devices for over a year now, which goes to say they will surely have something tangible at launch.
J.K Shin did assert that Android will remain their number one OS even with the Tizen launch and said they like Android and wish to continue with good relations with Google. Samsung’s strategy according to Shin is to always work with multiple software companies. He however went on to say that smartphones and tablets running Microsoft’s OS Windows 8 are not selling well, with people having much preference for Android.
See full interview here.
