Mozilla's $25 Firefox smartphone with Spreadtrum

Mozilla's $25 Firefox smartphone with Spreadtrum

 



Mozilla's sub-$50 Firefox OS smartphones are aimed at countries like India and Indonesia, where devices costing hundreds of dollars are out of reach of hundreds of millions of people. The idea is to bring a smartphone running a free/open operating system that is optimized for Internet access to people who have no net connection at all today. The phones are slow and only have a few apps, but they're infinitely more useful than a candybar-shaped "feature phone," and with their low pricetag, many people will be able to buy them outright, rather than being beholden to phone companies who subsidize handset purchases through long-term, abusive contracts; and they'll get online using devices that don't lock them into a single company's ecosystem for email, messaging, and apps. 

Mozilla's $25 Firefox smartphone with Spreadtrum

Spreadtrum certainly isn't a household name in the US, but Mozilla is less concerned with brand recognition than it is with delivering an ultra-cheap handset. The two companies have announced a new partnership that will see Spreadtrum building reference designs for Firefox OS phones with a target price of $25. (And no, we're not missing a zero there.) The heart of the effort is the SC6821, a Cortex A5-based chipset that supports WCDMA and EDGE networks, but not LTE. The platform includes WiFi, Bluetooth, cameras and FM radio, though touchscreen support appears to top out at 3.5-inch HVGA panels. The lack of 4G connectivity, older CPU design and low screen resolutions clearly mark this as a low-end initiative, but its one that will give it a major leg up in emerging markets like India where feature phones still rule supreme.
  

Lets look HUAWEI'S Y300 FIREFOX OS PHONE

Huawei has launched its first Firefox OS smartphone at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

• Firefox OS v1.1, 
• Dual-core 1GHz Snapdragon 8225 processor, 
• 512MB RAM
• 4GB storage
• 802.11n Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth 2.1
• 5-megapixel rear camera
• VGA front camera

The device seems to have the same basic specifications as its earlier Android smartphone. The company did not give a concrete timeline, though there are reports of a release in the next couple of months. Final pricing is also yet to be confirmed.