Samsung has reportedly postponed the launch of its first Tizen-powered smartphone to give it more time to attract application developers for its new home-grown operating system (OS), it announced Monday.

The Korean vendor has developed Tizen as a multi-device OS -- designed to run on phones, tablets, watches, TVs, connected cars – in an effort to challenge the dominance of Google (Nasdaq: GOOG)'s Android and Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL)'s iOS. It had planned to launch its first Tizen smartphone, the Samsung Z, in Russia before the end of September, having shown it off at the Tizen Developer Conference in San Francisco last month. (See Asia Takes On Android and Samsung Intros First Tizen Smartphone.)

But, as the Associated Press reports, that launch has been delayed, with no new date provided.

Other Tizen devices, including a smart watch and a camera, have already been launched by Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (Korea: SEC).

The news comes only weeks after Samsung announced that a slowdown in the global smartphone market growth rate had affected its second quarter revenues. (See Samsung Suffers Smartphone Slowdown.)

— Ray Le Maistre, , Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading