Even though Samsung will launch its first Tizen smartphones in a few months, the company will not sell them in the U.S. this year, as it isn’t ready to face failure in the region, Samsung U.S. mobile operations director of product marketing told Fierce Wireless in an interview.
“We don’t feel the U.S. is a great test market for those kinds of products,” Bidan said. “The U.S. market is pretty mature. Bringing a new entrant here that doesn’t meet a certain performance bar would be a challenge. Recognizing that, we don’t want to set ourselves up for failure.”
The first Tizen smartphone is expected to be unveiled at MWC 2014 with sales to start a month later, although actual release plans and pricing details have not been unveiled yet. For a while now, Samsung’s Tizen platform has been seen as an effort from Samsung to distance itself from Google, even though Samsung-made Android devices are a huge source of revenue for the company.
Bidan further said that Samsung needs to show better focus when cramming up software features inside new top mobile devices, such as the Galaxy S4 in 2013, in order to offer users relevant solutions to their needs. The exec estimated that Samsung went through “over 80 different software features” when it unveiled the Galaxy S4 last March, with many overlooked by potential customers. As for the company’s wearables-related plans, Bidan says that Samsung needs to make them interesting and relevant to consumers in order for “wearables to take off.”
