Up close with Samsung's Tizen-powered budget Z1 smartphone (pictures)

BARCELONA -- This is the Samsung Z1. It might look familiar to anyone who's used one of Samsung's older Android phones, but this chap runs Tizen, not Android.

With Tizen on board, Samsung has been able to make this phone extremely affordable for developing markets. It's on sale now in India for the equivalent of $90 (about £60 or AU$115).

It's available soon in Bangladesh, although Samsung has yet to announce any plans for a wider release.

Tizen is an open-source piece of software, developed by the Tizen foundation, of which Samsung is a major player. It's available not only for phones, but can be customised heavily for watches, home appliances, cameras and various other bits of technology. Samsung uses it in its new smart TVs too.

Samsung has really had its way with the software for this phone, making it look extremely similar to Android.

As well as various home screens containing widgets, there are eight quick-access apps along the bottom. Swiping up displays all your apps in a tray.

Even the navigation buttons on the bottom are identical to Android.

Yep, that's basically Android.

The phone itself looks just like any other old Galaxy phone too, with an all-plastic design.

There's a 3.4-megapixel camera on the back, and a 0.3-megapixel camera on the front. Inside is a 1.2GHz dual-core processor.

Hardly impressive specs, but then this is a very cheap phone.

It's not the most slick gadget around, but neither is it actively horrible.

The chrome-effect speaker grille, common on all of Samsung's Galaxy phone, sits at the top of the Z1.

I really like the deep red and gold colours of this model.

The white version looks pretty plain though.