Samsung Z is Galaxy on the outside, Tizen on the inside

Samsung Z is Galaxy on the outside, Tizen on the inside

Samsung Z - While Samsung has been a loyal individual of automaton for quite your time, it is also spent the past few years preparation up its own ASCII text file mobile software known as Tizen. when many prototypes and revisions, the corporate finally saw acceptable unveil the Samsung Z -- its 1st ever Tizen smartphone -- a handful of days agone. it had been simply the star of the show at the Tizen developer conference here in San Francisco, therefore we tend to were desirous to take it for a spin. 

At first look, you would be forgiven if you mistook the Samsung Z for one in all the company's alternative Galaxy S handsets. It's all terribly acquainted, from the Samsung brand at the highest right all the way down to the one physical home button at very cheap. Flanking the button on either facet area unit hot keys for the menu and back functions severally, which, again, mirrors its automaton cousins. Flip it around, and you may notice that the rear is roofed in this acquainted fake animal skin material we have seen on alternative Samsung devices too. It will have trickster edges than either the recent S5 or the Note three, however, with blandish sides and a so much blockier aesthetic.

Still, the Z itself felt pretty solid from our jiffy handling it, and that 4.8-inch 720p HD AMOLED show remained sharp and vivacious underneath the show floor's fluorescent lights. On either facet of the phone area unit buttons for volume and power, whereas Associate in Nursing 8-megapixel camera with crystal rectifier flash sits on the rear. alternative specs embody a a pair of.1-megapixel front-facing cam, 16GB of storage, a microSD card slot, a generous a pair of,600mAh battery and a a pair of.3GHz Qualcomm flower processor. It even contains a power saving mode, a fingerprint device and a rate monitor -- you recognize, like that Galaxy S5.

But enough of the hardware. Let's get all the way down to what sets this phone with the exception of the remainder of Samsung's mobile lineup -- the Tizen software. We'll simply say it upfront: it's quite bit like automaton, or a minimum of, the TouchWiz version of Google's mobile OS. The app drawer, notification receptacle and settings page area unit terribly similar in look and feel to what we have seen on the GS5. just like the image we tend to saw a number of months agone, you'll be able to even fill the house screen with Tizen's "Dynamic Boxes," or what the remainder folks decision customizable widgets. you'll be able to apparently have as several as 9 totally different home screens, and adding or removing these dynamic boxes is as straightforward as pressing and holding on the bit screen. Further, the camera app is nearly a dead ringer for that of alternative Samsung devices, with similar settings like "Best photo" and "Beauty face."

There area unit a number of unambiguously Tizen touches that stand out, however. the foremost obvious one is that rather than simply four or 5 favorite apps on very cheap of the house screen, you've got as several as eight. in addition, after you swipe au fait those favorite apps, you will pull them to the highest, revealing a split screen of the remainder of your apps beneath. From there, you'll be able to navigate your app drawer as per usual by swiping left and right. you'll be able to conjointly cluster apps along {in a|during a|in an exceedingly|in a terribly} see-thru folder that look very kind of like those on iOS. Also, once you are in split-screen mode like this, you'll be able to simply swap out your favorite apps by dragging and dropping them around as you see work. tho' it is a rather tiny factor, we tend to conjointly likeable {that you|that you simply|that you simply} might modification the interface's color theme just by swapping out the wallpaper.

Understandably, there we tend toren't that several apps that we might play with on the Z, as Tizen is such a young OS. Tizen apps area unit primarily net applications, engineered on standards like WebKit and HTML5. a fast look at the Tizen Store disclosed a astonishingly healthy variety of apps, tho' not ones from recognizable publishers. As you may expect, the Z supports most of Samsung's own applications, like S Health, S Voice and S Translate, all of that we tend to saw on our show floor model.

There's no word however on valuation of the Z, however that should not be a priority to most of you, as a result of it'll solely be offered in Russia within the third quarter of this year. Samsung sees it as a check market of kinds, and can be launching Associate in Nursing app challenge in this country to assist the Tizen effort on. once we asked a Samsung voice on however the corporate hopes to promote Tizen next to automaton, all we tend to received was a rather non-committal answer that it is a "multi-platform company" that desires to administer its customers as several selections as attainable. Still, we will not facilitate however marvel if Tizen, and the Z, area unit any signs of Samsung trying to exit of Google's code shadow.