Samsung has officially unveiled its first Tizen smartphone, the Samsung Z. It is scheduled to be shown for the first time in the flesh at the Tizen Developers Conference in San Francisco on 3 June - which surprisingly, perhaps, runs in parallel to Apple's WWDC in the same city, where we expect to see iOS 8 previewed.
The Samsung Z, which doesn't look much like the prototype device Pocket-lint played with at Mobile World Congress, has a decent specifications list. The manufacturer hasn't skimped on the device it hopes will convince people that its self-built operating system is a valid contender to Android, Windows Phone and, of course, iOS.
It is a 4G (LTE) handset, although no on UK bands at present, and has a 4.8-inch 1280 x 720 Super AMOLED display. A 2.3GHz quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM keeps things running smoothly - which we'd expect anyway, considering that's one of the prominent features of Tizen. And an 8-megapixel camera can be found on the rear, 2.1-megapixel one on the front.
There is 16GB of internal storage, with a microSD card slot allowing for expansion by up to a further 64GB, and its battery of 2,600mAh is par for the course.
Dimensions are 138.2 x 69.8 x 8.5mm and it weighs 136g.
READ: Exploring Samsung's Tizen smartphone: A glance into the future
The OS on board from the off is Tizen 2.2.1 which, to most outside the development community, doesn't really mean that much as previous iterations have not been seen by consumers. A number of key Samsung apps are pre-installed, including S Health which will presumably link with Samsung's Tizen-powered smartwatches, and one of the other key benefits to Tizen is that it is very simple for developers to port their Android applications to the platform. Therefore, we expect to see plenty more in the coming months.
The Samsung Z will launch in Russia first, in Q3, and will then be rolled out to other territories. It is not known as yet whether that will include the UK and US.