Linux-based Samsung Z3 smartphone launches in India

Samsung, the Korean giant, has launched another Tizen powered smartphone in the Indian market. The Samsung Z3 is priced at INR 8490 and will be available in India from October in Gold, Black and Silver.

Samsung

The phone features a 5.0″ super AMOLED display, 1.3 GHz Quad core processor, a 8.0 MP (f/2.2) main camera, a 5PM front camera, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage (with SD card slot). The phone weighs 137g and comes with a 2,600mAh battery.

The company has developed some additional features for the Indian market and one of those features is data compression. Since high speed Internet is still in its infancy in the country, the phone features ‘Ultra Data Saving Mode,’ which according to Samsung provides data compression and management capabilities for up to 40 percent less mobile data usage.

Frequent power cuts are a common practice in this country of more than a billion people, so Samsung is offering ‘Ultra Power Saving Mode,’ which allows users to operate on standby for up to 33 hours with less than 10 percent of battery life. So if you don’t have power for a whole day, your phone will stay alive for emergencies.

A brief history of Tizen

Samsung is leading the smartphone pack, along with Apple, in many markets, and Linux-based Android is the driver of Samsung’s growth. However, the Korean company is simultaneously toying with its own operating system not only to differentiate itself from competitors who use Android, but also to have complete control over its ecosystem.

The company has been working on Tizen project, a Linux based operating system that is being hosted by the Linux Foundation. The OS comes in multiple profiles to cater to different industries: there is Tizen IVI (in-vehicle infotainment), Tizen Mobile, Tizen TV, and Tizen Wearable.

So far, Samsung is the only member of the Tizen Association that is bringing Tizen based devices to the market. LG, despite being a member, is using WebOS, another Linux-based operating system, that it licensed from HP.

Tizen is primarily a Samsung and Intel initiative — it’s built on Samsung Linux Platform. Samsung later dropped its own Linux-based operating system Bada and merged it into Tizen.

The development of the project is guided by the Technical Steering Group, which manages the overall Tizen project, creating subsystem teams and delegating work to them as needed, tracking and managing the state of the Tizen project and subsystems.

Tizen was once seen as one of the most promising projects because it was fully open sourced and offered a much closer Linux experience than Android, including the possibility of the terminal app.