Mozilla has announced today that the first smartphone running the Firefox OS — the ZTE Open and the Alcatel One Touch Fire — will be going on sale soon. The new mobile OS is completely powered by open web technologies such as HTML5 and JavaScript, and is designed specifically to take advantage of low-end hardware while still delivering on performance.
The Firefox OS features every basic functionality that one expects in a smartphone: calls, messaging, browser, camera, music player, email, social networking (Facebook, Twitter) and much more. Mozilla has also included HERE maps with offline capabilities for navigation purposes. The apps for this OS will be distributed through the newly launched Firefox Marketplace. Some of the early apps that users can expect to find on the marketplace are AccuWeather, Poppit (game), Facebook, Twitter, Nokia HERE Maps, Terra, SoundCloud, Time Out and TMZ. Other local apps will also be available to users of a particular region.
The ZTE Open will go on sale tomorrow in Spain through Telefonica owned Movistar, a major Spanish mobile phone operator. The ZTE Open will cost €69 (Rs.5,341) for prepaying customers. Apart from ZTE and Alcatel, Huawei and LG are also going to announce their devices based on Firefox OS soon. Sony is also planning to release a Firefox OS based smartphone in 2014. The specifications of these devices aren’t out in the open as of yet, but this should hardly matter consider the market that is being targeted.
The first wave of Firefox OS devices will be available to consumers in Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela. Additional markets will be announced soon.
It is clear that Mozilla is targeting low-end smartphones such as Asha and cheap Android phones with the Firefox OS. Nokia’s Asha 501 was launched in India recently and it runs on the Asha platform. Low-end Android phones don’t perform well and lag a lot while running apps, but even they’re picking up in performance as hardware costs are coming down. It remains to be seen what effect a smartphone OS from a non-profit organization will bring to the table.
Source: Mozilla Blog
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