While we have known for a while now that Samsung’s first Tizen smartphone to go on sale has been a resounding success, we have not yet had overall sales statistics. We’ve heard of the Samsung Z1 clocking over half a million sales in both countries where it has been selling i.e. India and Bangladesh and it of course makes sense that an overall figure of a million units being sold is floating around today.
What is more important for the Samsung Z1, its unannounced likely successors and the future of Tizen is what Samsung plans to do over the next few weeks and months in the wake of the budget smartphone’s unexpected success. While the company is yet to announce any plans to expand availability of the Z1 or its possible successors in other parts of the world, Sammobile has it on record that future plans by Samsung include the introduction of a gold version of the Samsung Z1. We are not really sure if that is a good move since a gold version definitely means that it will cost more and the main driver of the Z1’s success so far has been its budget pricing but we’ll wait and see.
There’s also the issue of Tizen’s growth as a platform. Tizen is still young when compared to established giants like Android that have matured over the years. Since the Samsung Z1 is competing at the price range of many entry level Android smartphones, what it brings to the table in the form of a complete ecosystem matters a lot. Samsung has been courting developers for a while now and while the big names are yet to be that convinced, there are signs that it is making progress. Facebook, for instance, is already game and it may not be long before we see native Tizen applications from the company behind some of the most widely used social media applications in the world.
