South Korean based Samsung Electronics started sales of its Tizen smartphone on Wednesday in India. The inexpensive handset is just 5,700 rupees or $92 dollars.
The Z1 operates on the Tizen open-source operating system supported by Samsung and others including Intel and which to date powers some of the televisions and wearables that Samsung makes.
In June, Samsung announced it was launching a new Tizen, the Z, prior to the Tizen Developer Conference held in San Francisco.
The Z1 has low-end specs in comparison to the originally planned Z. This shows that Samsung has moved its focus with the Tizen to the lower end of the smartphone market, a huge segment in India as well as in other emerging markets.
The Z1 in India will compete with phones running on Android that have similar capabilities in their hardware and prices that are similar.
Tizen phones might take some time to grow in sales because people have not familiarized themselves with its operating system.
The Z1 runs on Tizen 2.3. It has a screen that is 4-inches and 480×800 pixels, with a dual core 1.2GHz processor. It has RAM of 768 MB and 4 GB of storage that can be expanded to 64GB, with using a microSD card. The electronics company claims the battery, which is 1500mAh can play video for up to 7 hours or can provide 8 hours of time talking.
Available in red, black and white, the new smartphone has a rear camera that is 3.1 megapixels and a front camera that is VGA with face detection software.
One key focus of the phone is entertainment. Samsung bundled the phone with free access for three months to songs and movies from different Indian entertainment sites on the Internet.
Samsung for security has placed a SOS alert feature on the phone. Users press the power button four consecutive times to send a help message to the primary contacts of the user and can track the location of the user to provide any assistance that is necessary.
