14 DAY TRIAL // Samsung is looking to become an independent device manufacturer. To that end, the Korean tech giant is home-growing its own silicone chips and has also developed its own OS which has been dubbed Tizen.
After a lot of delays, Samsung’s first smartphone bundling the platform, the Z1, has finally been launched in India for under $100 / €78 and found supporters with initial reviewers and customers.
Actually, the phone reportedly sold 100,000 units in less than a month in the competitive Indian market and another 20,000 units in Bangladesh. Samsung is also prepping to launch the Z1 in more markets which will further boost sales.
While these numbers don't seem like much compared to what Samsung usually sells in terms of smartphones, take into account that in Bangladesh roughly 500,000 handsets are sold in a month.
Samsung considers the Z1 a success
According to G for Games, now that Samsung is encouraged by the success the Z1 is seeing in these developing markets, it already went back to the drawing board to plan a successor.
We’re going to call it the Z2 for the time being. Moving forward, the information points towards the fact that the Z2 will be slightly better than the first Tizen OS model.
Which actually makes sense, considering that the latest Tizen SDK version that got released offers support for qHD screens (540 x 960 pixels).
The Z1 arrives with a 4-inch display with 480 x 800 pixel resolution and houses a 1.2GHz dual-core CPU of unknown origins fitted with 768MB of RAM and 4GB of internal storage.
So with the Z2, we could end up seeing a handset with a slightly better configuration, although the price range will hopefully remain gravitating around the same margin.
While we're on the topic of theories, Samsung’s range of Tizen smartphones might also get an unexpected boost from Russia. A few weeks ago, Russian Minister of Communication, Nikolai Nikiforov took to Twitter to denounce Google’s mobile monopoly using its Android operating system.
The politician also used his social media account to talk about grants that will be offered to developers who are willing to migrate apps away from Android and to real open-source platforms like Tizen and Sailfish.
So soon enough, everybody in Russia will be rocking a Samsung Z1/Z2 smartphone?
