The old saying goes that bad luck comes in threes. We all know that’s a load of rubbish though, of course. It turns out that it actually comes in fours.
After what was, by anybody’s standards, a disastrous seven days for Samsung last week, you’d have thought the company’s fortunes couldn’t get any worse. However, after poor financial, legal, and downright bizarre luck, the company has now managed to ruin its own product launch.
The Samsung Z, which is to be the first Samsung smartphone to run on its own custom-made Tizen-based operating system, was supposed to launch at an event in Moscow on Friday 11th July. Samsung decided to pull the plug just days before the event was to take place.
Perhaps an understandable move – if a product isn’t ready then it isn’t ready, and better to take the time to fix it than to feed a half-baked product to the consumer. That’s not quite what Samsung did though, as for some reason it still decided to go ahead with the launch event.
What do you do at a launch event with no final product though? It would seem that not too many people cared enough to find out, as the launch was attended by just half the original number of expected journalists. Those who did decide to show up were treated to some prototypes of the device.
Samsung declared that the reason for the delay was so that it could offer users the “fullest portfolio of applications”, which would suggest that it’s not so much the handsets that aren’t ready, but the ecosystem for its new Tizen operating system.
Samsung’s Russian representative speaking at the event, Dmitry Anosov, said that an advantage of Tizen is that, “The most obvious advantage [of developing for the Tizen phone] is that you’ll be at the top in a half empty store on a decent premium device.”
We’re not so sure just how much of a positive that is.
Fear not though, the Samsung Z will definitely be released at some point. It was originally meant to be unveiled at Mobile World Congress 2014 all the way back in March, though, so who knows when that will be.
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