When you’re as big and aggressive as Samsung, you can afford to place big bets on several different things (although that strategy didn’t work out so well for Nokia, did it?). Yoon Han-kil, the senior vice president of Samsung’s product strategy team, told Reuters that his company will ship wristwear based on the Android Wear operating system later this year — even though the company is increasingly getting behind the Tizen operating system.
What’s “Tizen“? It’s an open source operating system, like Android. Except Tizen is a project of the Linux Foundation, rather than being as product of Google’s. This has obvious advantages for a phone manufacturer that doesn’t necessarily want to operate in Google’s shadow. The Galaxy Gear 2 and Gear Fit run Tizen, not Android, which may be why they work only with Samsung phones. Yoon also told Reuters that Samsung is working on at least two Tizen phones, destined for second-tier markets.