Andre Yoskowitz
11 Jan 2014 10:47
According to a Samsung executive, the company's first smartphones running on the Tizen operating system will not reach the U.S. market.
Ryan Bidan, Samsung's director of product marketing for its U.S. mobile operations, says competition is too great in the U.S. for the intial line of Tizen devices.
"We don't feel the U.S. is a great test market for those kinds of products," he said, noting that Samsung will likely roll out Linux-based Tizen phones in other regions of the world. The U.S. market is pretty mature. Bringing a new entrant here that doesn't meet a certain performance bar would be a challenge. Recognizing that, we don't want to set ourselves up for failure," says Bidan.
The Tizen devices will begin selling at the end of March, in Japan, Europe and also in emerging markets.
Tizen, the open source operating system born from the death and merger of MeeGo and LiMo, has Samsung as its main backer and also has backing from Sprint, Intel, Huawei, Orange and Vodafone among others.
Samsung will use Tizen as a hedge since nearly all of their devices run on Android.