Linux Video of the Week: Meet the First Tizen Smartphone, Samsung Z

At the Tizen Developer Conference in San Francisco this week, Samsung unveiled the first smartphone to run the Linux-based Tizen mobile operating system. In this video, CNET reporter Jessica Dolcourt walks through the phone’s features and demonstrates its camera capabilities.

Samsung’s Tizen UI is similar to Android’s, she says, and the Z has many features in common with the Samsung Galaxy phones. The Tizen phone has the same rounded icons and setting options as the Samsung Galaxy S5, as well as the same fingerprint scanner and heart rate monitor. The camera functionality is also largely the same.

“When you snap open the camera you’ll notice a lot of the modes and the layout are very similar to what you’ll find in Samsung Galaxy phones,” Dolcourt says. “This is Samsung trying to maintain its brand and that’s very beneficial to people who aren’t familiar with Tizen.”

The Z comes pre-loaded with all of Samsung’s apps, as well as a few other common apps such as Twitter and Google search. The app store is still “bare bones,” she says, though that’s to be expected in a new operating system. Samsung will work with developers to increase the variety of available applications as the platform grows and plans to launch a new app challenge in Russia, where the Z will launch in Q3 this year.