Mozilla made Firefox OS official at the Mobile World Congress yesterday and also detailed the first two smartphones to run the open source OS. Firefox has bonded with Qualcomm to utilise their Snapdragon SoCs in the Firefox phones. Apart for the chip manufacturer, they’ve also teamed up with hardware partners such as ZTE, Alcatel, LG and Huawei. Sony has also announced its plans to release devices based on Firefox OS in 2014. The first Firefox phones that are announced are ZTE Open and Alcatel One Touch Fire.
Firefox OS is targeting entry-level devices and utilises HTML5-based apps to make the development easier. The marketplace of the open source OS, dubbed the Firefox Marketplace, already has social networking apps for Facebook and Twitter, Nokia’s HERE maps service, Box cloud storage, games from EA Mobile and Disney Mobile Games and many other apps that are to follow soon.
The Alcatel One Touch Fire will first launch in China and Latin America, and will be the first Firefox OS phone to hit Europe this summer. The One Touch Fire is powered by a 1GHz processor and comes with 256MB RAM. The low-end specs are a testament to the fact that Firefox OS doesn’t need a powerful device to run smoothly. The design of the phone is minimalistic at best and displays the trademark Firefox orange shade on a white body. The phone doesn’t include a front-facing camera.
Alcatel One Touch Fire Specifications:
- 3.5-inch capacitive touchscreen
- 320 x 480 pixels resolution
- 3G, HSPA (up to 7.2 Mbps), GPRS/EDGE
- Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n
- Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP
- GPS with A-GPS support
- 3.2 MP primary camera
- 512MB internal storage with microSD card slot (comes with 2GB card)
ZTE has also announced a Firefox phone with almost same specifications, perhaps Mozilla is guiding the hardware decisions. The ZTE Open is powered by a Cortex A5 processor clocked at 1GHz and is equipped with 256MB of RAM.
ZTE Open specifications:
- 3.5-inch capacitive touchscreen
- 320 x 480 pixels resolution
- 3G (HSPA up to 7.2Mbps), GPRS/EDGE
- Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n
- Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP
- GPS with A-GPS support
- 3.15 MP primary camera
- 512MB internal storage with microSD card slot (comes with 2GB card)
LG and Huawei are yet to announce their first Firefox OS phones, but Mozilla has said that it will be soon.
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