Samsung's been playing with its Tizen operating system for some time now, looking for a way to break free of the Google ties it relies on for its Android Galaxy smartphone successes. The OS recently wormed its way into the Samsung Gear 2 smartwatch, and now, after a long development period, there's a Tizen phone too — the Samsung Z.
Testing the waters in Russia for the third quarter of this year, it's a 4.9-inch handset with a 1280 x 720 super AMOLED display, running off a 2.3GHz quad-core processor (as-yet undefined), backed by 2GB of RAM. 16GB of internal storage is included, with support for MicroSD cards. There's an 8MP camera on the rear, a 2.1MP camera up front and version 2.2.1 of Tizen running.
The Samsung Z also takes a few features from the Galaxy S5, with a fingerprint sensor embedded in its home button and a heart-rate monitor on the back too. Overall, the Tizen UI looks fairly similar to what's seen already on the Samsung's TouchWiz Android skin.
The handset will be on show at the Tizen Developer Conference in San Francisco this week. Tizen has excellent HTML5 support, which should aid app developers in terms of making cross-platform versions of their software, though Samsung still has a long way to go when it comes to courting app developers to boost the Tizen app ecosystem. [BBC]