Here at Tizen Experts have always looked quite fondly towards Huawei. If you’ve seen the quality of the Smartphones that the company has been producing of late, and their expanding growth which will hopefully take them into new markets, including europe, then you know exactly why. In Q2 2014 Huawei was the third-largest smartphone maker in the world.
Recently the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) had an Interview with Richard Yu, the head of Huawei’s consumer business group, and some of his remarks regarding ecosystems other than iOS and Android have been resonating around the Internet since yesterday. Yu mentioned that the company had struggled with Windows Phone (WP), making a loss for the last couple of years, and have therefore cancelled any WP plans. That is Interesting reading, but its his next statement that got peoples attention (or at least ours):
We have no plans to use Tizen. Some telecom carriers are pushing us to design Tizen phones but I say “no” to them. In the past we had a team to do research on Tizen but I canceled it. We feel Tizen has no chance to be successful. Even for Windows Phone it’s difficult to be successful.
This does seem to be yet another huge blow to the Tizen Smartphone dream, first with Samsung not releasing a Tizen smartphone in Russia, and then them shelving their Samsung Z product, that they made great noise about at at Tizen Developer Conference 2014, and now this. Huawei is a member of the Tizen Association, which provides in-market support to companies working on Tizen, and as such was seen as one of the first companies to bring to market a Tizen Smartphone.
There are some Smart phone manufacturing companies that are looking towards Samsung to take the lead for Tizen Smartphones. Samsung after all have been working on a ton of Tizen code behind closed doors, and we have been waiting for them to release the code in the spirit of Open Source, but nothing has happened in terms of code releases for almost a year now. There is no faith in Tizen Smartphone, as there is no leadership, no up to date code, no real world Tizen developer Smartphones, and no Tizen Smartphone roadmap.
In October we will see Samsung in China for the Tizen Developer Summit Shangai. This will be a good time for the Korean giant to come clean about their Tizen Smartphone ambitions, or the lack there of. They will be in China, an important market for them, which also happens to be an important market for Huawei, and a good time for both of them to talk.
