Samsung"s Tizen Phone is Like the Galaxy S5 and That"s a Good Thing - Webmaster News

New Post has been published on http://www.outils-webmaster.eu/samsungs-tizen-phone-is-like-the-galaxy-s5-and-thats-a-good-thing/

 

After years of setbacks and delays, Samsung finally unveiled the Samsung Z, its long-awaited Tizen smartphone. Tizen is a Linux-based operating system that can power smartphones, smartwatches, televisions and laptops. Tizen is a project of the Linux Foundation but is primarily led by Samsung and Intel.

The Samsung Z, which will only be available in Russia, is the first commercially-available handset to run the operating system which, up to now, we’ve only seen on smartwatches, cameras and televisions. The company showed off the much-anticipated device at Tizen’s Developer Conference in San Francisco, likely to be one of the phone’s few appearances in the US.

The Samsung Z has a more angular design than many of Samsung’s other devices. While the Galaxy S line has rounded corners, the Z opts for more traditional squared corners, though the back edges are a bit rounded for an easier grip. Speaking of an easier grip, the back plate is made of a faux leather material that is easy to hold but doesn’t feel cheap like plastic backs sometimes do.

The 4.8-inch SuperAMOLED display is crisp and sharp, though the touchscreen occasionally lagged or failed to recognize my finger.

Though Tizen is a totally new operating system, those familiar with Android will feel at home with the Samsung Z. It relies on nearly identical menus, gestures and navigational buttons as Samsung’s TouchWiz interface. Swiping down from the top of the home screen brings down a shade where you can quickly access notifications and settings like wifi, bluetooth, volume and GPS, for example, and long pressing the home button pulls up your recently-opened apps, which can be killed with a swipe.

Samsung clearly went to great lengths to emulate the Galaxy S5, its most recent flagship. Some of the Z’s standout features— the fingerprint sensor and heart rate monitor, for example— first debuted on the S5 earlier this year.

The Samsung’s Z color scheme will subtly change when you choose a new wallpaper.

The fingerprint sensor, which will store up to three prints, functions just like one on the S5— unlock the phone by swiping down the screen over the home button. In my limited testing it seemed to be about as reliable as the one on the S5, which we found to fail at least 50% of the time.

Samsung put a lot of effort into memory and power management and it shows. The phone boots in seconds— noticeably faster than either my iPhone 5S or HTC One. The company estimates battery life at 18-19 hours with normal use but says the device will last up to 11 days on standby in its “Ultra Power Saving Mode” (another S5 feature, coincidentally).

The home screen has some other design finishes that could be easily missed— changing the wallpaper image will subtly change the color scheme of the entire phone, for example. You can also customize the home screen with “dynamic boxes,” widgets that display time, weather, calendar info and other data from the device’s apps. A long press on the home screen (another gesture borrowed from TouchWiz) lets you swap out and customize the boxes.

The elephant in the room with Tizen is its app ecosystem, or, more accurately, its lack thereof. Tizen is so new there are very very few apps actually built for the platform. Instead, the OS relies on HTML5 web apps to do most of the heavy lifting.

For now, Tizen relies primarily on HTML5 web apps, rather than native ones.

While these apps definitely do the trick, it’s rather obvious they weren’t optimized for the phone. Games were generally pretty quick to load but other apps— like Twitter and YouTube—had noticeably laggy launch times. Luckily, the 2.3GHz quad-core processor ensures the apps are snappy and responsive once they get going.

Where the Z does well on the app front is with its suite of “mini apps,” which provide a true multitasking experience. Long press the menu button to access the apps, which for now include camera, calculator, dictionary, browser, phone, calendar, video player and note-taking applications. These lightweight apps run in small boxes on the home screen and you can run several of them at once.

The phone does have some native Samsung apps baked-in, including S Health, Samsung’s health-monitoring dashboard that can track some workout stats and keep tabs on your heart rate, thanks to the Z’s heart rate monitor.

It also comes with S Voice, the device’s voice-enabled assistant that can launch apps and search the web, S Translator and the WatchOn TV remote control app

The Z’s camera has seven smart shooting modes. And though it doesn’t have as many modes, or the range of camera settings as the S5, the smart shooting modes are where the camera really shines.

Some of the camera modes emulate cameras from popular third-party apps. Dual, for example, snaps a photo from the device’s front and rear-facing cameras simultaneously, just like popular selfie app Frontback. While Eraser will snap five consecutive photos and remove any moving objects from the frame.

The Samsung Z’s dual-camera shooting mode takes photos with both of the device’s cameras simultaneously.

The other camera modes were surprisingly effective and the variety of shooting modes will help make up for the lack of third-party alternatives. Photos didn’t look quite as crisp as ones taken with my iPhone but the 8-megapixel rear camera is lightning fast.

Despite its late arrival, the Samsung Z is a powerful device that definitely has some standout features and shouldn’t be counted out. Samsung hasn’t revealed a price for the Z but earlier reports have suggested the first Samsung will be targeting the emerging markets of Russia and India with a low-cost devices so it likely retail for considerably less than its Android counterparts.

But, if it really wants to compete with Android, it will need to address its app problem, which Samsung already seems to be trying to do. In an effort to lure developers, 100% of revenue from Tizen apps will go directly to the developer for one year.

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

Source: http://mashable.com/2014/06/05/samsung-z-hands-on/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=rss