In one of the most biggest announcements, Mozilla announced seven smartphones integrated with its Firefox OS at the MWC 2014, in Barcelona on the first day. The Firefox OS is specifically integrated in budget smartphones, will have a Spreadtrum’s SC6821 chipset. However, Mozilla is expanding to 12 new markets, this year, including countries of South America, Africa, Europe and Asia, with its existing 15 in 2013. India,despite being a major smartphone market, doesn’t feature in its map for launch of Firefox-based smartphones.
The new smartphone will have an 8.8-cm (3.5-inch) HVGA touchscreen, integrated Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, FM and a camera whose resolution is yet to be confirmed. Mozilla plans to shake the market world-wide and it hopes that the phones based on the Firefox operating system will present the smartphone features at a price, where the market offers only the feature phones, currently.
Jay Sullivan, the COO of Mozilla said that the likely Firefox OS device units will be shipped between 500,000 to 750,000 in the first six months, this year, in a report by BGR. He said, “The way that we compete is through building a community. So, what we’ve done is that Firefox OS is completely open source. We don’t build it and open source it when it is done. It is open source. So, Telefonica, Qualcomm, KDDI and many organisations are actively contributing code. So, we feel like we punch way beyond our employee base.”
In today’s times, focus on emerging markets is very high, as Lenovo recently bought Motorola (in part) since Moto G has a foothold in Latin America. Apple aims to outreach markets like China and India, wholly. Microsoft has also announced a broad manufacturer partnership programme at MWC, to reach into the budget device market across the world, said the same report.
Source: EFY Times
