Samsung the Greatest Flatterer of Mobile Products

At Ars Technica, Ron Amadeo reviews Samsung’s first Tizen smartphone:

The million dollar question for any new OS is always “Why would anyone pick this over Android?” Google’s free OS seems purpose-built to smother upstart operating systems like Tizen. It has tons of developer support (even Samsung supports Android more than Tizen), killer integration with Google services, and is available on any kind of hardware you can imagine.

Samsung hasn’t provided a good answer to this question, which makes its outlook especially bleak in the hyper-competitive smartphone OS market. New OSes always have problems, usually with app selection and hardware availability, but they’re supposed to make up for their ecosystem problems by bringing something new to the table. Windows Phone had a new interface style. Blackberry 10 devices have a small but vocal built-in fanbase, well-made hardware with physical keyboards, and lots of enterprise experience. But Tizen doesn’t have any stand-out aspect. It’s all the negatives of a new OS without any of the positives.

Samsung seems better at ripping off Apple’s hardware designs than it is at ripping off Android’s software designs. They really epitomize the textbook definition of shameless. Also: the typography on Tizen is horrendous.

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