Android, iOS and Windows may be household names, but you'd be forgiven if you've never even heard of Tizen. This year's Tizen Developer Conference marked the fifth annual gathering (yep, there's already been five). Walking around the Hilton ballrooms, it was clear many of the attendees were Samsung employees. It wasn't always that way. The first such gathering, in 2012 in San Francisco, marked the introduction of Tizen 1.0 as an open-source project. The real launch came in February 2013 when a group of heavy-hitting companies, led by Samsung, held a splashy party at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow in Barcelona. Attendees snacked on freshly shucked oysters and made-to-order crepes as they learned how Samsung and its lead development partner, Intel, planned to upend the mobile market. On display were several prototype phones running Tizen.
Hokyu Choi, director and head of the Tizen mobile business at Samsung, said Tizen phones will launch several Middle Eastern and Latin American countries this year, At that time, Apple's iOS and Google's Android dominated the phone world, but it wasn't too farfetched to think there could be a strong third player, Microsoft tried, So did BlackBerry and Mozilla, All failed, "The phone is highly dependent on apps," Creative Strategies analyst Carolina Milanesi said, "Look at how well Microsoft [and others] learned that lesson."But Tizen had other big wireless providers on board, like Sprint, Vodafone, Japan's NTT Docomo and France's Orange, Kiyohito Nagata, managing director of strategic marketing for NTT DoCoMo and then-chairman of the Tizen Association, hailed the launch event as "the basement of the future success of the Tizen OS and ecosystem."Eventually, the carriers all ditched their plans for Tizen phones, Rather than pushing out a flashy, high-end phone, Samsung instead targeted emerging markets with a cheap ted baker iphone xr mirror folio case - arboretum reviews device, Its first Tizen phone, the Samsung Z, was slated for release in late 2014 in Russia; instead, the company delayed it indefinitely..
The company eventually introduced the Samsung Z1 in India in 2015 for less than $100. It expanded to other Southwest Asian countries that year and moved into Africa and Southeast Asia -- South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and Indonesia -- in 2016. This year, it will launch Tizen phones across the entire continent of Africa as well as Middle Eastern and Latin American countries such as Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, Bolivia and Peru. Last week, Samsung introduced the Z4, its latest budget Tizen phone. It also boasted at the developer confab that Tizen phone sales jumped 30 percent globally from 2015 to 2016 and will more than double in 2017.
"We're expecting continuous but even faster growth in the future," Hokyu Choi, director and head of the Tizen mobile business at Samsung, said during a keynote at the Tizen Developer Conference, He added that, eventually, Samsung's Tizen phones "will be available to all countries in the world."Still, it will be tough going, Even though Samsung has talked up the success of Tizen, CounterPoint Research analyst Neil Shah estimated Samsung sold 1 million Tizen phones in India, the software's first and biggest market, That's a big number until you consider it's less than 3 percent of the total number of smartphones the company sold in that country, and less ted baker iphone xr mirror folio case - arboretum reviews than 1 percent of the total smartphones in India shipped by all handset makers, he said..
Take smartwatches. Samsung's first device, the Galaxy Gear from late 2013, initially ran Android, but Samsung updated the software to Tizen in May 2014. Ever since then, virtually all of Samsung's smartwatches run Tizen. In the first quarter of 2017, Tizen leapfrogged Google's Android Wear software to become the second biggest operating system for smartwatches with 19 percent market share, according to Strategy Analytics. Apple, with its watchOS, had 57 percent of the market. "It makes sense for Samsung to say, 'Use Android where it does best,' but Tizen has a really useful role to play in wearables and other places where Android has fallen short," Jackdaw Research analyst Jan Dawson said.