This is the Samsung Z1—the world's first Tizen phone. After one of the bumpiest pre-launch situations in recent memory, Samsung's home-grown OS has finally hit smartphones.

Tizen, if you'll recall, is Samsung's "Android Killer." While Samsung rose to power on a wave of Android devices, it was also quietly developing its own OS in the background. If Samsung ever got tired of Google's Android requirements, Tizen would be there as a cold war threat and good negotiation leverage for Google Play licensing talks.

Samsung and Android rocketed up the market share charts together, but was Android successful because of Samsung, or was Samsung successful because of Android? Tizen was supposed to answer that question.

Specs at a glance: Samsung Z1 Screen 800×480 4.0" LCD (233 ppi) OS Tizen 2.3 CPU 1.2GHz dual-core Spreadtrum SC7727S (Cortex-A7) RAM 768MB GPU Mail 400 Storage 4GB (plus MicroSD card) Networking 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS Ports Micro USB 2.0, headphones Camera 3.15MP rear camera, 0.3MP front camera Size 120.4mm x 63.2mm x 9.7mm Weight 112g Battery 1500 mAh, removable Starting price $92 unlocked Other perks Dual SIM slots, FM Radio, MicroSD slot, removable battery

At least, this was the conventional wisdom about Tizen a few years ago, when Samsung was dominating the Android ecosystem and making record profits. Today, the threat of Samsung dumping Android sounds like something from a bygone era. Better competition from Apple, Chinese OEMs, and the rest of the Android ecosystem sent Samsung sales plummeting and put the company on the defensive. Basically, everyone started making big screen phones, and Samsung's good times were over.

If Tizen feels late to the party, that's because it is. The OS was originally scheduled to debut in 2012, but it ended up being delayed, and delayed, and delayed. Along with the shift in Samsung's market confidence, Tizen's focus has shifted too. What was originally a smartphone OS ended up trickling into the market in Samsung cameras and smartwatches, where it has basically served as a one-off "feature phone" OS.

When we last saw Tizen on a smartphone, it looked rather promising. It was running on a flagship device that looked a lot like a Galaxy S4, and as late as July 2014, Samsung executives were telling Tizen developers that the OS would debut on a "decent premium device."

Sometime in the last six months, though, Tizen's smartphone strategy was rebooted. A blog post this month from the company claimed "Tizen is 'lighter' than other operating systems," positioning the OS as a good choice for low-end devices and a key to Samsung's "Internet of Things" strategy.

Which brings us to our vessel for Tizen: the Samsung Z1—a low-end $92 device debuting in India. Relegating Tizen to the developing world might seem like a cop out, but as the second-most populated country on Earth, India has become a smartphone hotspot. The Z1 will have to do battle with the likes of Google's $105 Android One smartphones and Xiaomi, which set up shop in India a few months ago.

The Hardware

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Samsung/Ron Amadeo

The Z1 is undoubtedly a Samsung device. In fact, the device looks nearly identical to 2011's Galaxy SII. It's a $92 phone, though, so we can't be too picky about the design. The word of the day for this hardware is "adequate"—there's nothing here that will knock your socks off, but it's all functional.

The body of the Z1 is an all-plastic rectangle with rounded corners and a faux-metal ring around the sides. The 800×400, 4-inch LCD isn't bonded to the front glass, so there's a visible air gap between the two surfaces. The viewing angles are pretty good, and the 233 ppi means the screen isn't a pixelated mess even if it can't compare to more expensive phones.

The back is a matte sheet of thin plastic that peels off to reveal a removable battery and MicroSD slot, along with two SIM slots. The whole device feels airy and almost hollow, like the fake demo smartphones that some stores use. It's nowhere near premium, but for a $92 smartphone everything here is standard.

With Tizen, Samsung finally has a smartphone OS to call its own, which puts it in a position of nearly Apple-esque control over everything from the design to the internals to the software: the OS, the SoC, the screen, and the phone body. For the Z1, though, Samsung skipped its Exynos division and went with someone else's SoC: a 1.2GHz dual-core Spreadtrum SC7727S SoC. This is a Cortex A7-based CPU with an integrated 3G modem, roughly comparable to something you'd find in an entry-level Windows phone or the Moto E. Besides the SoC, you've got 768MB of RAM, 4GB of storage, a 3.15MP camera, and a 1500mAh battery.

On the front of the phone you'll find Samsung's trademark hardware home button, flanked by "back" and "menu" buttons. Tizen makes the same mistakes that Android did: it hides a bunch of options behind a menu button, with no on-screen indication that there are more options in the menu button. So if you're looking for an option, you usually end up pressing "menu" on every single screen and hope that something pops up.

The menu button betrays Tizen's age. It was designed circa-2012 as a drop-in Android replacement that would run on the same hardware. Back then Samsung's Android phones used a menu button, so Tizen did too. The menu button was long seen as a poor UI choice—Google removed it from the core Android spec in 2011—and Samsung finally joined the rest of the ecosystem and dumped the menu button with the Galaxy S5 last year. Sadly, Tizen never got the message.

All in all, the Z1 is a cheap, serviceable smartphone. The hardware earns itself a hearty "meh," but what makes the Z1 interesting isn't the hardware—we're here for Tizen!

Just what is Tizen?

Tizen is the Highlander of the mobile world. The Linux-based OS is an amalgamation of every other failed or aborted Linux smartphone platform. If it's Linux-based and not made by Google, there's a good chance it's been rolled into Tizen at some point. Tizen's family tree includes Moblin, Meego, LiMo, and Bada, with large chunks of code written by the Linux Foundation, Intel, Samsung, and even the pre-Microsoft Nokia.

Make no mistake though, this OS is Samsung's baby, and it's Samsung that controls it. While the footer at Tizen.org says it is "a Linux Foundation Project," Samsung is the only company making Tizen products, a Samsung executive VP is co-chair of the Tizen Technical Steering Group, and the first paragraph of the Tizen SDK EULA states that it is "a legal agreement between you and Samsung."

The company in second place for control of Tizen is Intel, though ironically the company's chips have nothing to do with the ARM-powered Z1. Intel's involvement stems from its work with Moblin and MeeGo, OSes created before Android fully supported x86. Back then, Android primarily supported ARM, so Intel needed to create a viable smartphone OS to sell its upcoming smartphone chips. When Android 4.0 put x86 support on even footing with ARM, Intel was fully assimilated into the Google collective. While the company still has an exec on the Tizen Technical Steering Group, Android now seems to be Intel's primary focus.

The core OS is open source, but some applications that sit on top of the OS are developed by Samsung, and a patent license for these components is only available for the "Tizen Certified Platform." It's basically the "Google Play" strategy: have an open source core for easy porting by partners, but lock down important interface components so that you still have some control over the OS. At this stage Samsung probably won't be picky about who uses Tizen, but the option for control is there.

There are two types of Tizen apps: HTML5 apps and native Tizen apps (written in C or C++). On the surface, Android might seem like it has a similar setup—the NDK allows for native code and the SDK is for apps that run on the Android virtual machine. Android clearly delineates what the two different programming toolchains are for, though: the SDK is for regular apps, and the NDK is for high-powered games. Tizen doesn't offer any guidance as to which toolchain developers should pick, and it has separate sets of APIs for each development method.

The dueling programming methods are a result of Tizen's development history. Meego and Tizen 1.0 both used HTML5 apps, but when the project merged with Samsung's Bada, it also picked up Bada's native app development. Basically the right half of the above diagram is the original vision for Tizen, and the left half is from Bada.

Tizen sticks much closer to the Linux desktop stack than Android does. It uses desktop Linux staples like the X Window System, GNU C Library, RPM for system packages, and PulseAudio for a sound server. All the Web stuff—HTML5 apps and the browser—uses WebKit. While this sounds a lot like desktop Linux, the Tizen special sauce is all the affordances made for smartphones, like a touch-first, mobile-first interface and app APIs.

Our Samsung Z1 is running Tizen 2.3, the latest stable version of the OS. Unlike Android, Tizen has an open development process, and work on the next version—Tizen 3.0—is being done in public. Tizen 3.0 (the smartphone version) will add 64-bit and multi-user support, swap out the X Window System for Wayland, and move the Web runtime from WebKit to Crosswalk, a Google Chromium-based project.

While there are other HTML5-based platforms out there, right now Tizen doesn't seem to care about interoperability. The move to Crosswalk would allow developers to write an HTML5 app and spit out versions for Android, iOS, Chrome, and Tizen. And for the record, Tizen currently doesn't have any official support for Android apps.

Listing image by Ron Amadeo