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Samsung plans to release a smartphone running its upstart Tizen operating system by August or September, according to Bloomberg.
The Tizen phone will be one of three flagship products for Samsung, the others being the newly unveiled Galaxy S4 and another version of the Galaxy Note, Bloomberg reported, citing an interview with Y.H. Lee, executive vice president of marketing for Samsung’s mobile business.
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The timing is just a bit behind the July-to-August timeline that Samsung had told CNET while at Mobile World Congress last month.
The high-end comment also fits in with comments made by executives from Japan’s NTT Docomo and France’s Orange, who both said their Tizen phones would be high-end devices.
A Samsung representative confirmed the August-September target to CNET.
Tizen is an open-source operating system with the support of multiple handset vendors and wireless carriers, with its development under the guidance of Samsung and Intel. The platform draws from different sources, including Nokia’s defunct MeeGo, as well as the LiMo Foundation.
The development of Tizen has come somewhat as an industry reaction to the dominance of Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. The carriers like the flexibility of Tizen because it allows them to tinker with an operating system that gives them more control over the subscriber.
For Samsung, virtually all of whose smartphones run on Android, Tizen is considered an alternative if ever the company were to wean itself off of its dependence on Android. Although both Samsung and Android maker Google have reiterated their respect for each other, many believe there are tensions between the two major players in Android.
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