Samsung has been working on Tizen for quite some time. We’ve heard plenty about the OS and have heard many promises and statements about Tizen based smartphones being launched for almost an equal amount of time as Samsung has been developing it. Still, no Tizen phones have been launched nor have we even seen one. Samsung has since made announcements that Tizen would be shown off at an event one day prior to this years upcoming MWC event in Barcelona, Spain, which they have already sent out invitations for and happens next month on Feb. 23rd. This is all good news for Tizen enthusiasts, unless you reside in the U.S. that is. According to Sammobile, Samsung won’t be releasing any Tizen based Smartphones into the U.S. anytime soon. Samsung’s Ryan Bidan, who is Director of Product Marketing in the United States was quoted saying in an interview that
“We don’t feel the U.S. is a great test market for those kinds of products. 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.”
While this might be a major disappointment to some, if you think about it, it would be difficult for Samsung to enter the market in the U.S. with a brand new OS that should compete with Android and iOS. Both Android and iOS hold a significant (or rather most) portion of the market share for smartphones, and even longstanding smartphone providers like Blackberry and Windows can’t keep up. For Samsung to introduce something completely new into a region that already has a major dominant force of two large companies and their operating systems, would be to shoot themselves in the foot so to speak.
The U.S. isn’t the only region where Android is a major player, but it’s certainly has the strongest foothold here, and other regions would be a more beneficial test market for Samsung with Tizen before coming stateside. To play to Samsung’s benefit, one thing can be said for the entire situation. Samsung has the largest portion of Android handset sales. That is without a doubt an undeniable fact. They also have plenty of money to throw around on things like marketing, which they already do for their current Android flagships, and as a result it helps them sell millions of phones. So you could figure that if anyone could position themselves to bring a new OS competitor into the market it would be them. Still, time will tell whether Tizen will even be able to compete with the likes of Android and iOS at all.