Delays Mount for Samsung’s First Tizen Smartphone

Samsung’s first Tizen-powered smartphone in the Z has faced delay after delay since first being announced in February of this year in the wake of a planned Japanese launch on carrier NTT DoCoMo the next month, only to be cancelled at the last minute with no official explanation given at the time.

The phone was then pushed back for a developer launch in June during the same week as Apple’s WWDC and a Russian developer conference later that month, yet no hardware was made available for developers to test at that time either, to which Samsung officially confirmed a Russian launch for later this month, only to have developer chatter debunk that confirmation as well during the latest conference for the platform two weeks ago.

Now, in separate reports by the Wall Street Journal and Fortune, the Samsung Z Tizen smartphone is indeed being delayed yet again “when we can offer our users a fullest portfolio of applications” according to a statement given by a Samsung representative when asked about the status of the device, suggesting that Samsung’s Tizen initiative is lagging behind schedule due to lack of developer interest in the platform.

For reference the Samsung Z is said to feature a 4.8-inch 720p display, a 2.3GHz quad-core processor that Samsung will not specify, along with an 8-megapixel main camera with dual-shot, panorama, best photo, and mini mode. Other hardware features include a fingerprint scanner, 2.1-megapixel user-facing camera, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, and support for microSD cards up to 64GB. Additional wireless support includes Category 4 LTE, Bluetooth 4.0, dual-band Wi-Fi, GPS/GLONASS, NFC, and an infrared port.

Whether the device will see the light of day has been a question asked ever since the hardware was confirmed late last year, and it seems that even Samsung doesn’t know when it will launch Tizen, and that doesn’t bode well for its long-term plans to shift away from Android.