Samsung has been working on releasing a smartphone that runs the Tizen OS for a while now, with past statements that it would arrive sometime in 2012, and then later 2013. Here it is, almost the end of the year and there isn’t a Tizen Smartphone in sight. According to ITNews though, Samsung’s first Tizen powered smartphone could possibly be unveiled before we reach MWC, with an exact date of Feb 23rd.
You should take this news with a grain of salt, as past experiences regarding anything that revolves around Tizen have shown us we can’t rely on a date. Samsung however has apparently sent out an invitation for an event that is supposed to happen on Feb.23rd. Mobile World Congress starts Feb. 24th in Barcelona, so could this be an early mention of the Tizen smartphone before they show it off at MWC? Attendees of the event are to be given an exclusive look at the latest and greatest in what Tizen has to offer, but there is no actual specific mention of a smartphone itself that runs on the Tizen OS. Its easy to believe that there may possibly be a Tizen smartphone unveiling coming up at the MWC Tizen Camp, since Tizen is in fact a functioning OS that runs in some pieces of hardware, just not smartphones. Perhaps that will change this year, but we’ll just have to wait until Feb. 23rd comes around to be sure. Samsung had apparently unveiled some sort of unspecified device at last years MWC during a Tizen showing that had been running version 2.0, but it wasn’t the phone we were expecting to see.
If Tizen were to be released at this upcoming event, it begs the question whether or not it will be running a similar version of the software that was shown off last year, or if it will be a new and completely overhauled update that has been tweaked and fine tuned. The entire Tizen Project is a merging of two other operating systems; meeGo and Limo, which are both respectively part of the Linux Foundation and the Limo Foundation. It has been two years since the Tizen Project was started up, will it finally be time to see a Tizen smartphone in all its glory?