After ditching its plans to launch the Samsung Z, it looks like Samsung is all set to launch their first Tizen based smartphone in India by November 2014. During the launch of Club Samsung 2.0 service, Tarun Malik, director of MSC (Media Solutions Centre), South West Asia at Samsung confirmed to Economic Times that they are indeed planning to launch their first Tizen based smartphone in India but it will not be the Samsung Z. Malik’s team is responsible for promoting Tizen in India.
As we reported earlier, Samsung planned to ditch the Samsung Z in favour of cheaper Tizen smartphones. We speculate that Samsung might launch Tizen based SM-Z130E or SM-Z130H during the Diwali festive season later this year. Both these entry-level smartphones were spotted heading to India for testing purposes a few months earlier.
Samsung believes that they can differentiate Tizen based devices from the competition through their content. Samsung has launched the Club Samsung 2.0 service in India which offers localised content such as music, videos and TV shows. Even though media streaming services such as Airtel Wynk and Vodafone Music Store have been launched in India recently, Samsung believes that the Indian market is big enough for multiple players to compete and they can offer better content when compared to telecom operators. Samsung had also launched the smart learning digital education store earlier this month.
“We started late, but we are very focused. We are not shooting in the wild. This is a game that has to be led by the device manufacturer and not the pipe (telecom operators),” Malik told Economic Times.
Malik has also confirmed that the Tizen based offerings will co-exist with Android smartphones. Earlier this week, Google had announced a list of their hardware partners who are expected to launch Android One smartphones in the next phase and Samsung was not a part of it. So we believe that, at a price point of $100, Samsung is planning to compete with Android One with the help of Tizen based devices.