A new kid in town will soon arrive in the market as Mozilla starts to push out the developer preview phones of its mobile web-based operating system for those who are interested in making apps and games for it. They will be given a chance to take it for a spin by buying it through Geeksphone.
Ubuntu has been recently announced to come on smartphones this year and the demos seem to look good. Mozilla has been developing their own operating system but it failed to catch a lot of fanfare – basically because they still don’t have anything to offer. And yes, we think that could have triggered the launch of this Firefox OS dev phone. It has already been floating around for a while now and this is the first time that their OS will get a public appearance. Whether we admit it or not, leaks still make something exciting – which the Firefox Mobile OS probably lacked on. Yes, we know that there were several screenshots and videos leaked last year, but that didn’t seem to put a mark to many.
So fast forward to today, Mozilla now have an Orange smartphone for the developers to test and play around with. The device was codenamed as “Keon” and if the specifications will be compared towards today’s Android standards, it’s a bit underwhelming. Of course, hardware alone will not tell you the whole story. We should remember that the Windows Phones were launched with mediocre specs, but the software worked it out, making it buttery smooth.
The Mozilla Firefox OS Developer Preview phone “Keon” features a 3.5-inch HVGA Display,1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S1 processor, 4GB of internal storage, and 512MB of RAM. Other notable specs include a 3-megapixel camera, GPS, microSD card slot, and a 1580mAh to power up the phone.
That configuration seems to basic, don’t you think? Fortunately, it has a bigger brother named as “Peak“. It has a 4.3-inch qHD display, 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 CPU, 512MB RAM, 8-megapixel main camera, and 2-megapixel front camera, and a larger 1800mAh battery. The rest are almost identical to the Keon.
Now, we might think that this new OS is crap because of its low to mid-end type of hardware but that shouldn’t really be the case. Why? Because if the Firefox OS can run smoothly on this set, then it can have a bright future ahead of it. You know, that’s Android’s undying enemy. Alright, so what about the games? Well, since it’s a web-based OS, I guess it’s not one of the deciding factor of getting it. It’s still up to the developers if they will try to take a shot at it, though.
There is no groundbreaking feature that we should go nuts about yet but we can still hope that Mozilla still has some nice gems hidden on their laboratories out there. If this developer preview phone attracts bunch of developers, then this might get some attention. Else, with the continuous growth of Android, it can go unnoticed in thin air.
There is still no information about its official launch and pricing but rest assured that we’ll keep you posted once we get some details.
To be fair, the Firefox OS isn’t meant to slug it out with iOS, Android, or WP. It’s squarely targeting emerging markets almost exclusively, so the specs we see on the development phones are what we would most likely expect in production. It’s interesting, but I doubt its success. As we’ve seen from various China phones, Android can do just fine in emerging markets. Heck, even Jelly Bean has been found to run in modest specs. If there’s a new OS that may be able to make Android run for its money, it would most likely be Ubuntu OS. At least it offers something vastly different from the Big Three.