June 12, 2015 10:30
Samsung's smartphone is gaining some presence in the cheap and mid-range smartphone markets in Bangladesh and India.
The company's Z1 smartphone, which costs less than $100, ranked first in terms of sales in the first quarter of this year in Bangladesh, after outselling a locally-made cheaper handset costing around $60. The Z1 is the company's cheapest smartphone, and the first to run on its own operating system called Tizen.
Samsung also sold about 1 million units of the cheap handset in India, the third largest smartphone market in the world, making it the best-selling smartphone in the under-$100 smartphone market. Most Samsung handsets are equipped with Android OS, which is used by nearly 80 percent of the 1.4 billion smartphones sold every year.
Samsung launched the Z1 phone in India and Bangladesh to gauge the response to its new OS. "As a small number of people own smartphones in these South Asian countries, the Z1 can be affordable for first-time smartphone users," a Samsung spokesman said.
However, non-Android OSs still seem to have a long way to go. For example, Tizen has only about 4,000 apps available, while Apple's iOS and Microsoft's Android have around 2 million.
Samsung is planning to launch the Z1 in other parts of Southeast Asia.
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