Samsung's First Tizen Phone Is On Its Way To India And Will Be Affordable

The Indian market is full of what manufacturers and consumers like to call ‘budget’ phones. These ‘budget’ phones are smartphones that are generally within reach of a large section of the Indian audience, and usually come with either Android, or as we’ve been witnessing recently, Windows Phone pre-installed. However, South Korea’s Samsung seems keen on adding a third OS to this list — Samsung’s own Tizen OS.

Tizen is seen as an upcoming competitor to Android. That’s not only because Samsung hopes to make a lot of phones run on the OS, but also because it is completely open source. Tizen is developed by Samsung in partnership with Intel. To speak of the budget Tizen device that Samsung plans, it is going to be a sub-$100 smartphone. As such it will go head-on with popular phones in India like the Xiaomi Redmi 1S and the Android One trio. While I don’t see why Samsung can’t produce a phone that is affordable. I can certainly tell you that getting noticed in a market that’s filled with budget phones is going to be nothing less than a daunting task for Samsung. There’s no official word from Samsung on this yet, but the device is expected to be given a ‘Z1’ moniker. MediaTek’s MT6582 and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 400 are often the usual suspects on a budget phone, so it’ll be interesting to see if the Z1 comes with either of those. It will also be safe to assume that there’ll be no 4G LTE support or any other fancy stuff on the Z1. Largely due to the penetration of 4G networks is only in its nascent stages in India. The Z1 is expected to launch in India December 10th.

Talks of a Samsung made Tizen phone have been making round for more than a year now. The market looks ripe for adoption of a new OS right now. Samsung with it’s already deep-rooted market share has the potential to turn things a bit in its own favour with the launch of this new handset. Depending on how well the phone does in India, Samsung might also launch the Z1 in Russia which shares a lot of its market characteristics, and a few manufacturers, to India.