Less than a week after a rumor first surfaced claiming that Samsung would release a Tizen smartphone in 2013, the company has come forward to confirm the news. In a statement sent to Bloomberg Businessweek, Samsung said that it intends to "release new, competitive Tizen devices within this year and will keep expanding the lineup depending on market conditions." The company didn't go into specifics about launch timing or which carrier(s) will play host to these new devices, but the aforementioned rumor claimed that the Tizen devices will likely hit Japan and other countries around the same time, with Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo being named specifically as one potential home.
Samsung and Intel have been the major backers of Tizen since its debut in late 2011, but so far we've yet to see any handsets running the open source OS materialize in the marketplace. While we still don't know exactly what kind of hardware Samsung is cooking up for Tizen, it'll be interesting to see what the company comes up with considering its portfolio of past devices and that some see Samsung's backing of Tizen as an attempt to lessen its dependence on Android. Is the fact that Samsung will be crafting these Tizen devices enough to pique your interest in them?
