On Thursday, Samsung revealed in a statement to Bloomberg Businessweek that there's multiple "competitive" Tizen devices in the pipeline for 2013.
"We plan to release new, competitive Tizen devices within this year and will keep expanding the lineup depending on market conditions," Suwon, South Korea-based Samsung said in an e-mailed statement.
Tizen is open source and standards-based software for multiple device categories, a collaboration between Samsung, Intel and the Linux Foundation as well as getting support from leading operators such as NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone Group.
It supports both Intel and ARM processors and its SDK and API allow developers to use HTML5 to write applications.
Its main components are the Linux kernel, the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) and the WebKit runtime.
Tizen is being developed to reduce their reliance on Android, which now powers around two thirds of all smartphones sold today. Apple's iOS is the second most-popular mobile phone OS on the market, but it is not available to third-party manufacturers.
A critical question for all four new competitors is the availability of popular applications. Microsoft is pushing developers to produce Windows Phone 8 versions of some of the most popular cell phone apps and today, a couple of months after launch, users can find versions of many in the Windows Store.
