Samsung has announced a delay in the release of its Blackberry-style Knox security software, which will mean the package won’t come pre-installed on the company’s Galaxy S4 smartphones, as initially planned.
According to The New York Times, sources within the Korean smartphone giant say it has decided to delay the release of the security software until sometime in July, in order to undertake further carrier and internal testing.
With the company’s flagship Galaxy S4 smartphone launching on Telstra tomorrow, the software will not be ready in time to either be pre-installed or downloaded at launch.
Samsung’s Knox software is designed to help the company compete against BlackBerry 10 in the business and enterprise market, copying key BlackBerry 10 features including separate user and enterprise profiles.
“The Samsung Knox Container is an isolated and secure environment within the mobile device. Complete with its own home screen, launcher, applications, and widgets, applications and data inside the container are separated from applications outside the container. This provides a powerful solution for the ‘data leakage problem’ associated with the BYOD model,” the company states.
Other key features of Samsung Knox, which sits on top of Android, include an encrypted file system, virtual private networks and remote device management.
“Knox enables existing [Android apps] to automatically gain enterprise-grade security for data storage and transmission with-out any new application development,” the company states.
“[It] also relieves application developers from the burden of developing individual enterprise features such as FIPS-compliant VPN, on-device encryption (ODE), and enterprise Single Sign On (SSO) [for apps].”
Knox security is one of a number of apps and services the company is pushing to increase its presence in the platforms, services and apps markets, which include the release of the company’s own Tizen smartphone platform, a web browser being co-developed with Mozilla and a music download service.
“You will likely see the first smartphone using Tizen from Samsung in the third quarter of this year,” Samsung Mobile chief JK Shin said earlier this year.
The company is still downplaying speculation software, such as Knox or Tizen, is being developed because of a rift with Google, which entered the hardware business through its acquisition of Motorola Mobility last year.
“We like Android and we plan to continue our good relations with Google. I don’t think it’s correct to say that there’s friction,” Shin says.
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
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