David Nicholson: Samsung's $90 Tizen OS Z1 smartphone specs and spy shot leaks

Sunday, December 21, 2014

Samsung's $90 Tizen OS Z1 smartphone specs and spy shot leaks

Samsung had big plans for Tizen when the company drew support from other major hardware players to position it as an alternative to Android. A Tizen smartphone with equivalent spec-sheet to the flagship Galaxy devices was planned by the company, but the project couldn’t materialize after Samsung’s Tizen partners backed off. Samsung is still holding on to Tizen though, but with a low-end offering named Z1. The device is reportedly launching in India first, on January 18th. A spy shot of the device shown off on a presentation slide and screenshots of the device running Tizen have leaked on the web.

According to the Chinese source, Samsung planned to launch the Z1 earlier this month, but due to some unexpected delay, the launch has now been postponed to January 18th. The smartphone will be launched in India on that day and is expected to be priced at a very low price of $90. For that price you will be getting a 4.0” WVGA 800 x 480 display with a pixel density of 233 PPI, a dual-core 1.2GHz chipset, 512MB RAM, 3MP rear camera, Wi-Fi and 3G HSDPA connectivity options. And although the leaked image isn’t the clearest, the device seems to follow the Galaxy Alpha design language. The spec-sheet of the Z1 is definitely quite unimpressive, and is not likely to draw much interest considering the fact the Moto E and the Xiaomi Redmi 1s Android smartphones with much superior specifications are already on sale for just a little higher price.

As far as the Tizen user interface is concerned, the leaked screenshots actually seem very similar to the TouchWiz UI on Samsung Galaxy Android smartphones. It doesn’t look like Samsung has tried to differentiate the UI on its first Tizen product, which seems a bit strange as that makes the device quite pointless. The only difference buyers would notice with the Z1 when compared to an equivalent priced Galaxy smartphone will be the different OS. The hardware and the UI are not much different at all.

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