Following several days of rumors that the release of Samsung’s first Tizen-based smartphone had been delayed, the Korean language website i24news.com reported today that Samsung officials have stated that the launch of the company’s first Tizen device is being pushed out by two months.

Shortly after the mid-May release of version 2.1 of the Linux-based Tizen mobile operating system, Samsung confirmed that it planned to ship a Tizen smartphone this year. Then in late May, TechTastic discovered a device in Samsung’s UAPROF systems listed as GT-I8805 (aka Redwood) running Tizen 2.1 on an ARM Cortex-A9 SoC, and offering 1280 x 720 resolution and LTE support.

Soon thereafter, the Tizen Greek Community leaked photos of a GT-I8800 running Tizen 2.1 with similar 720p resolution. According to this GSMArena analysis of the leak, the phone appears to borrow from the latest TouchWiz 5.0 UI layer found on Samsung’s Android-based Galaxy S4, with features like S-Voice, S-Beam, and WiFi Direct.

Now, as reported by i24news.com (Google translation), it appears Samsung has confirmed that it is delaying its first Tizen phone’s launch for several months, possibly to allow more time for the Tizen phone’s ecosystem partners to prepare for its arrival.

In other Tizen-related news, Japanese firm Systena Corp. recently announced the first-ever Tizen-based tablet, which also appears to be the first Tizen product of any kind to reach market. The unnamed Systena Tizen tablet offers high-end features including a 1.4GHz, quad-core Cortex-A9 system-on-chip, 2GB of RAM, and a 10.1-inch, 1920 x 1200-pixel display.

The Systena tablet offers robust specs that come close to matching the most powerful Android tablets currently on the market. The slate incorporates an unnamed 1.4GHz, quad-core Cortex-A9 processor along with 2GB of DDR3 RAM and 32GB of flash. The 10.1-inch display offers impressive 1920 x 1200-pixel resolution. Additional listed features include WiFi, a microSD slot, and a 2-megapixel rear-facing camera, as well as a 0.3-megapixel front-facing camera.

A short introduction to Tizen appears in the box below. Other Tizen-related stories appear in the Related Posts list below the box.
 

About Tizen Tizen Architecture (click image to enlarge) Basically, Tizen is a cross-architecture, open source software platform based on a comprehensive standards-based HTML5 implementation that was designed to support multiple device segments, including the smartphone, tablet, smart TV, netbook, and in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) markets. To achieve this cross-platform flexibility, Tizen uses HTML5 as the main focus for application development, allowing developers to maintain a single codebase. The Tizen platform supports Web applications (HTML, Javascript, CSS) and provides a rich set of services that include an application framework plus content, location, messaging, multimedia, network, social, and system services. Slides from the Tizen Architecture talk at the May 2012 Tizen Developer Conference are available here (pdf file). For further details on Tizen, visit the Tizen project website.