The first smartphones running Mozilla’s Firefox OS smartphone platform have been unveiled by Alcatel and ZTE at the 2013 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Mozilla has announced its first-generation handsets will initially be released in Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela.
As a result of Mozilla’s emerging market strategy both of the first two handsets, the ZTE Open and Alcatel’s One Touch Fire, are low cost, entry level devices.
The ZTE Open includes a 3.5-inch HVGA screen, a 1GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, a 3.2-megapixel camera and supports Bluetooth, GPS and WiFi.
Meanwhile, Alcatel’s One Touch Fire includes a 3.5-inch screen and 1GHz processor, with a 3.2-megapixel rear-facing camera, 256MB of RAM and 512MB of internal storage expandable with an SD card.
Mozilla hopes the low-end devices will help it to capture market share in emerging markets ahead of a 2014 release in the US.
In a market such as Brazil, for example, iOS has slipped from 3.2% a year ago to just 1.6% today, with Android on 60.7% (up from 28.9% a year ago), while Symbian continues to be used on 27.9% of smartphones (down from 44.6%).
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
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