Samsung may have made a big deal about the Tizen operating system that it ships with the all-new Z1 smartphone, but according to the folks at Android Central, the phone (and the OS) isn’t really devoid of the whole Google/Android experience. If you aren’t aware, the Samsung Z1 is the Korean giant’s first-ever Tizen toting phone, which was released a few weeks back at an event in the Indian capital of New Delhi. The phone is essentially an entry-level device, made to compete with the onslaught of Chinese phones that have dawned the Indian market in the past months.
According to the report, it would seem the Samsung Z1 is a phone to be ‘very much at ease with Google’s ecosystem’. Now, from the looks of it, it seems that Samsung may have taken some cues from Google’s take on open source software for mobile (read: Android) to develop its in-house rendition of the same, i.e., Tizen. The report goes on to add that the device comes with Google’s search app and the YouTube app, both of which seem to carry over the cosmetics from their Android counterparts. In fact, the YouTube app was found to be a placeholder for the mobile version of the website — m.youtube.com — but with the added eye candy, which is in line with the Android version of the app.
Being a direct rival to the Android One scheme of phones, which are under direct control of Google, one would have expected the first Tizen phone to have something different to offer, which unfortunately doesn’t seem to be the case here. In fact, the default browser on the smartphone comes with Google as the default search engine; to add to that, there’s no option to change it to either Bing or Yahoo, two of the more popular search engines after Google. With the Samsung Z1 receiving software updates in full flow, we’re hoping to see a lot more action on the software front on the Z1, especially if it’s going to have more original content which is the need of the hour.