First Firefox smartphone launches in Spain

MADRID: The world’s first consumer sales of a smartphone powered by the Firefox operating system have launched in Spain.

The new phone, ZTE Open, went on sale Tuesday at 69 euros ($90) and runs on  a Firefox system developed by the Mozilla Foundation, which campaigns for open  development of the online world.

 

Mozilla, a non-profit community of developers and users, enters as a minnow  into a market dominated by the mighty duopoly of Apple and Google whose iOS and  Android programmes are in 90 percent of smartphones.

 

Mozilla joined with Spain’s Telefonica and Chinese handset maker ZTE to  launch the new handset, which uses the Internet as the platform for all its  functions and applications.

 

“We believe that smartphones need to be more open and that the web is the  platform for making this possible,” Telefonica Espana chief executive Luis  Miguel Gilperez said in a statement.

 

Telefonica said it planned to sell Firefox OS devices in other markets  including Colombia and Venezuela in the “coming weeks”.    

 

Mozilla chief operating officer Jay Sullivan predicted the new phone would  stimulate a “new wave of innovation for the web”.    The ZTE Open has a 3.5-inch screen, 265 MB RAM, a 3.2 MP camera and comes  with a 4GB microSD memory card. It has messaging, email, calendar, FM radio,  camera, Nokia mapping and the Firefox browser.

 

First online reviews of the phone were mixed, though almost all admired the  low price.

 

Online technology review site engadget.com said there was a “significant  amount of lag” in the user interface when scrolling web pages or navigating  applications. But a reviewer on pcworld.com said he noticed no lag in a short  test.

 

Telefonica said the ZTE Open was the first of a series of Firefox OS  devices to be launched this year, noting support by other manufacturers  including Alcatel OneTouch, LG, Huawei and Sony.

 

Mozilla, which aims to take third place behind Android and iOS, announced  its plans for Firefox OS at a mobile telephone fair in Barcelona in February  last year.

 

Google’s Android ran 69 percent of all handsets sold last year and Apple’s  iOS 22 percent, said a study by independent analysts Canalys.

 

Analysts say the two leaders will still dominate the market in 2013  although there could be room for a third player.

 

There are several operating systems vying for that number-three spot,  however, including Microsoft’s Windows Phone, Blackberry, Firefox and Samsung’s  open-source project Tizen.