Tizen (the OS) has a long history of never making it. Meego was Tizen's ancestor, and it only released Nokia N9, shortly after Nokia was in a lot of trouble, switched to WP, and finally sold the mobile division to Microsoft. Nokia N9 was a great phone though - both in terms of hardware design and smartphone user interface design. When Meego was dissolved by Nokia; Intel, the other partner and the Linux foundation found another partner looking for an alternative: Samsung, and rebased the source to form the Tizen OS. It has almost been 3 years since then. Tizen has never come to a smartphone (although it has come to smart watch and recently smart TV), even with multiple promises from Samsung - until now. Last week Samsung released Z1 in India. The fist ever commercially available Tizen based smartphone in the world.
Samsung Z1, unlike Nokia N9, does not try to stand out in terms of either hardware design or user interface design. So it does not ask for a premium. It is costing about 5.7K INR. But is touting fast boot time (not sure how that is useful for an always on device anyway), and great browser (I am not sure if anything is better than Firefox ;-) ! The other specs that matter - hardware are paltry. It has only a 3.1 MP camera, which is quite lousy. Only 768 MB RAM, which is odd and low - but is 512MB + 256MB, for reference. Apps are non existent (I bet, Firefox OS supports more web apps than what Tizen would support). There is no personal assistant. At this price tag - other phones - WP and Android, have pretty good and maturing personal assistants - Google Now and Cortana.
Even though, I like open source, and promote it when ever possible, I think Tizen is too late too less. I would rather recommend a Firefox OS based phone (such as this beauty: http://fkrt.it/hr6AlzNN) , instead of either Tizen or Sailfish based phone, if you must have only pure open source based smart phone. Oh, and don't even ask me about that unicorn Ubuntu phone.
(On a side note I feel that Samsung Z1 could run Firefox OS, or Firefox OS actually optimises for low end specs of Intex and other Firefox phones currently available in India - which clearly it is not).
Samsung Z1, unlike Nokia N9, does not try to stand out in terms of either hardware design or user interface design. So it does not ask for a premium. It is costing about 5.7K INR. But is touting fast boot time (not sure how that is useful for an always on device anyway), and great browser (I am not sure if anything is better than Firefox ;-) ! The other specs that matter - hardware are paltry. It has only a 3.1 MP camera, which is quite lousy. Only 768 MB RAM, which is odd and low - but is 512MB + 256MB, for reference. Apps are non existent (I bet, Firefox OS supports more web apps than what Tizen would support). There is no personal assistant. At this price tag - other phones - WP and Android, have pretty good and maturing personal assistants - Google Now and Cortana.
Even though, I like open source, and promote it when ever possible, I think Tizen is too late too less. I would rather recommend a Firefox OS based phone (such as this beauty: http://fkrt.it/hr6AlzNN) , instead of either Tizen or Sailfish based phone, if you must have only pure open source based smart phone. Oh, and don't even ask me about that unicorn Ubuntu phone.
(On a side note I feel that Samsung Z1 could run Firefox OS, or Firefox OS actually optimises for low end specs of Intex and other Firefox phones currently available in India - which clearly it is not).
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