The Samsung Galaxy S5 hit the market on Friday, and is thus far selling faster than its predecessor, a Samsung executive told Reuters this week.
Yoon Han-kil, senior vice president of Samsung's product strategy team, declined to talk exact numbers since it's still early days, but he predicted that "S5 sales should be much better than the S4."
Meanwhile, he confirmed that a Tizen-based smartphone is expected in the second quarter. And while the latest Gear smartwatches from the Korean electronics giant were Tizen-based devices, Samsung will have an Android-based smartwatch later this year, Reuters said.
In meetings with Samsung at its headquarters outside Seoul recently, the company told PCMag that Tizen, its in-house, Linux-based OS, was still a cross-device strategy – but it wouldn't give examples of any other devices that will run it anytime soon.
Samsung's Gear 2 will be an outlier in the world of smartwatches this year, an independent Tizen-powered device amidst a slew of Android and Android Wear gadgets.
Tizen was widely seen as a backstop for Samsung in case Google's control over Android became too suffocating. Developed with Intel, the OS has lived in a weird limbo for about two years now, with software releases and apps appearing (often juiced by Samsung and Intel money) but no actual devices to run them on.
Samsung pledged support for Android Wear, Google's official smartwatch platform, and has been backing off from duplicating Google's services with stores like Samsung Hub. But the Gear 2, coming just six months after the Android-powered Galaxy Gear, is Tizen.
Timing played a major role here, Samsung product managers said. The Gear project was started before Android Wear, so Tizen was what was on hand. Android Wear also doesn't support some of the sensors Samsung wanted, such as a heart rate monitor.
But what else is coming out with Tizen? Samsung pointed at consumer electronics, when it pointed anywhere. A Tizen phone could communicate particularly easily with a Tizen-powered TV, they said: cars, refrigerators and even air conditioners could also run the OS. With LG ahead of Samsung on a smart TV OS through its purchase of Palm's HTML5-powered WebOS, the equally HTML5-supporting Tizen could take Samsung's TV line into 2015 and beyond.
Samsung put an interesting spin on the Gear 2's quick turnaround, too. The company won't admit that the original Galaxy Gear was unsuccessful, but just read our review: it was clunky, had short battery life, and didn't sell. The Gear 2 came just six months later, but it isn't eating into a huge market of Gear loyalists, because there just aren't many of those.
Future Gears may also come quickly, Samsung said, because they're seen as fashion items rather than consumer technology. That means they could iterate more than once a year with fashion trends, the company said.
Will they be Tizen or Android Wear? Samsung says it's committed to Tizen, but I'm hedging my bets.
For more, see PCMag's reviews of the Samsung Gear Fit and Galaxy S5.