Samsung is the top smartphone seller in the world and sees most of its sales come from its Android-based smartphones but it looks like the company isn't placing all its bets on Android. Samsung has been co-developing a new an open-source, Linux-based mobile platform with Intel, called Tizen. Tizen runs on multiple devices including smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, and more.

Tizen is designed to offer users a consistent user experience from device to device and is a truly open-sourced platform that allows developers to easily create HTML5 applications for any device running Tizen. Unlike most smartphone OEMs, Samsung offers its customers different choices when it comes to the OS of their smartphones. Samsung currently sells smartphones based on both Android and Windows Phone.

Many believe Tizen is more of a competitor to Android than any other smartphone OS and is a sign that Samsung could possibly be loosening its reliance on Google's Android OS, especially after Google's acquisition of Motorola, a direct competitor to Samsung in the mobile industry. It makes sense for Samsung to keep its options open and to offer its customers as many options as possible when it comes to choosing a device as personal as a smartphone.

Samsung is expected to launch its first Tizen-based smartphone in 2013 and could possibly show the world its first glimpse at Mobile World Congress in February. While Tizen might be unfamiliar to you, it's not to global wireless carriers such as Orange, Vodafone, SK telecom, Telefonica and Sprint who have already pledged support for the new platform. In a new report Samsung just got the support of Japan's largest mobile provider NTT DoCoMo, which has over 60 million subscribers and is expected to offer Samsung's first Tizen smartphone in the first quarter of 2013.