14 DAY TRIAL // Samsung has been developing its own mobile operating system called Tizen for quite some time now. But even if we have seen some of its products take advantage of the platform arrive on the market, including some smartwatches and a camera, the company is yet to offer a handset powered by the OS.
But Samsung’s affair with Tizen has been one full of torment. About seven months ago, Samsung actually got to officially announce the high-end Samsung Z. But the handset never got to making it into retail because the Korean tech giant had a change of heart.
Remember the Samsung Z?
The device was supposed to arrive with a 4.8-inch Super AMOLED display sporting 1280 x 720 resolution and to be powered by a quad-core 2.3GHz processor (probably a Snapdragon 800).
Samsung Z also had a fingerprint and heart rate sensor (pretty much like the Galaxy Alpha which we reviewed not so long ago) and was announced with features such as Download Booster and Ultra Power Saving Mode.
Other hardware specifications included 2GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, two cameras (8MP main camera and 2.1MP frontal camera), 16GB of internal storage (expandable via microSD card slot), LTE-A, NFC and IR sensor.
Anyhow, immediately after officially announcing the Z smartphone, Samsung probably realized it had made a grave mistake and completely shifted around reorienting itself towards putting Tizen onboard a budget-friendly handset instead.
The device is known in the rumor mill as the Z1 and was supposed to launch a few weeks ago, but we all know this didn't happen after all.
Now thanks to a Twitter post by Tizen Korean and one by Naver, we get to take a look at the unannounced smartphone for the first time.
We also get a bunch of screenshots from the device, so you can take a look at some of the UI elements, icons, navigation interface and widgets.
Samsung Z1 is going to be a budget affair
The consensus on the street is that the Z1 (codenamed as Kiran) will hit the streets with a 4-inch WVGA display and packing a dual-core Spreadtrum SC7727S SoC clocked at 1.2GHz fitted with ARM Mali-400 GPU under the hood.
The handset also takes advantage of 512MB of RAM, dual-SIM card slot, a 3.2MP primary camera plus VGA front snapper, 3G connectivity, Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth v4.0 and microUSB v2.0 port.
Samsung should have rolled out the device on December 10 in India, but the launching event got pulled off for some mysterious reason. Will the fate of the Z1 be similar to the Z, a smartphone that got butchered in its cradle?
