Samsung launches its first Tizen smartphone `Z1` in India

Samsung Electronics has released its first Tizen phone “Samsung Z1” for 5,700 rupees (around 92 U.S. dollars) in India on Wednesday (local time). Tizen is an open operating system that was developed to break with Google’s Android.

After plenty of speculations on a possible sale in Japan and Russia since early last year, Samsung has unveiled the Tizen phone in India. Samsung Electronics took India as its first market for the Tizen phone because the market has large growth potential with a relatively low smartphone penetration rate.

According to market researcher Strategy Analytics, the number of smartphone users in India last year amounted to only 11 percent of India’ total population. However, the research organization has forecasted that India will surpass the U.S. to grow into the world’s second largest smartphone market following China in 2018.

“We encourage Tizen with a low price to new Indian customers who are not familiar with Google’s Android or Apple’s iOS for the lack of smartphone experience,“ a source from Samsung Electronics said. “If more customers including Indian customers get familiar to Tizen, we expect the `Tizen ecosystem` to be created fast.”

Samsung Z1, a Tizen-based phone that Samsung Electronics held a launching event in New Delhi, the capital of India, on Wednesday, can quickly boot itself and boasts fast application speed. It also has improved internet functions so that it allows a fast webpage access and reduces data usage.

Samsung sees that the success of the Tizen OS would depend on the creation of a related ecosystem. The company invited local content and service partners to “Tizen Partner Day” in Bangalore, the Indian version of Silicon Valley, and opened an app store where users can download Tizen apps. To encourage Indian developers’ participation, it decided to pay 100 percent of app sales proceeds to developers for the next one year.