Samsung Set to Deliver Tizen-based Smartwatch

Samsung is expected to deliver a Tizen-based smartwatch featuring its own services and a new HTML 5 version of the open source OS next week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, according to reports.

The Korean mobile device giant, long said to be working on a Tizen smartphone to introduce at the show, still may take the wraps off handsets running the open source OS along with other wearable computing devices, including the popular fitness bands, sources cited in a CNet report said. Samsung simultaneously is prepping to showcase its Galaxy S5 smartphone, perhaps featuring a fingerprint sensor and a 64-bit chip, at its Unpacked event on Feb. 24.

For months, Samsung has been teasing about offering a Tizen OS smartphone—going so far as to suggest the platform gives it a hedge against banking too much on its Google (GOOG) Android success, and setting expected debut dates for its new mobile devices—but this is the first word has leaked about the company debuting a smartwatch.

Samsung’s opening salvo into smartwatches, the Galaxy Gear introduced last fall at a $300 price point, has suffered from limited features and applications, with the overriding criticism that the unit looks good but doesn’t do much. We’ll see how this next iteration of Samsung’s smartwatch—if the vendor does, indeed, take the wraps off the device as rumored—performs running the Tizen OS.

Whether Tizen can become a viable alternative to Android’s dominance lacks an answer at this point. So far, aside from the few Tizen OS-based developer handsets that have surfaced, the biggest noise about bringing to market an open source smartphone or wearable, for that matter, has come from Samsung.

Indeed, the company has suggested all along that a Tizen-based smartphone will be a door-opener to new devices and markets. Yi Wook Bok, a Samsung software R&D principal engineer, said last November the vendor is “trying to prepare every technology that we can come up with since it’s hard to predict how the market will change. The advantage of Tizen over other competitors is that it has the best technology to make devices more compatible with each other.”

Tizen’s device-to-device compatibility and platform extensibility, which could become more critical to the vendor if the nascent wearables segment takes off, seems particularly important to Samsung.

Last week, the Tizen Association added 15 new members to an existing lineup of organizations signed on to its three-month old partner program, including mobile game publishers, operators, application developers, mobile software management vendors and telecommunications companies.