Earlier this month, Mozilla announced that they were entering the smartphone market with Firefox Mobile OS.
Steve McCaskill, TWE:
Carlos Domingo, director of product development innovation at Telefonica Digital, said as a web OS, Firefox OS was much lighter and demanded less processing power, meaning that it runs more efficiently. He said this meant it would run better on the same hardware than an Android phone and offer the same experience on a cheaper system[…] The prototype had a touch screen, with four buttons at the bottom, with Domingo saying that every application was built with HTML5.
While this is far from a final examination, it doesn’t look like Firefox Mobile OS is going to try to compete with high-end phones. The picture of the prototype shows it running on a fairly low-res screen, and the aesthetic isn’t exactly polished. It’s early still, but if this isn’t what we can expect the final product to feel like, I wish they would have kept it under wraps. It makes Android look good by comparison.
So, is Mozilla trying to build the Orkut of cell phones — something that is popular elsewhere, but not in the North American and European markets? This is a strange product, and it certainly doesn’t appear to be a direct competitor with the iPhone, but we’ll be keeping our eyes on this.
Source: TechWeek Europe