We’ve all heard about the Mozilla, Firefox OS right? We even saw a few of those phones pop up at Mobile World Congress back in February. Admittedly we dismissed them because of their very low-end specs. But since they are targeting emerging markets first, it might be exactly what they need. Mozilla will begin selling their phones this Summer in five countries. That includes Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Poland and Venezuela.
Mozilla’s CEO Gary Kovacs is speaking at AllThingsD’s Dive into Mobile Conference today, and he explained why they are doing a slow rollout with their devices and OS. He said that they are targeting emerging markets first. Which makes perfect sense since Android and iOS have the major markets like the US and China. Kovacs also said the first phone will be launching around June.
Just because Mozilla is targeting emerging markets, doesn’t mean the US is being left out in the cold. We’ve already been told that Sprint is committed to launching a Firefox OS-based phone and that it should be hitting their store shelves in 2014. Kovacs went on to state that Mozilla is waiting for the Firefox OS ecosystem to develop a bit before they launch their OS in the extremely highly competitive market that is the US. Which is a pretty smart thing to do. That’s why Ubuntu is having trouble right now, on Nexus devices.
Firefox OS is a web-based mobile operating system that is going to be open for any developer to tinker with. Similar to Android. All the apps will run within the browser which will provide uniformity across devices.
So how many of you are interested in at least checking out what Mozilla has to offer with their Firefox OS? I know I’d definitely like to try it, if not pick up a Firefox OS device. Sounds like something promising. But with all these other OS’ trying to jump into the market, will Firefox survive?