ZTE Mozilla is First Firefox OS Smartphone, to Debut at MWC

News
By Zak Islam
published

1.5GHz system-on-chip said to be included.

ZTE has all but confirmed the existence of the first Firefox OS smartphone for consumers, with a debut scheduled in late February at the Mobile World Congress.

The Chinese handset manufacturer unveiled two hashtags to follow for their MWC 2013 event: #ZTEGrandMemo and #ZTEMozilla. Mozilla recently announced the first smartphones powered by its upcoming mobile platform, but those are intended for developers.

ZTE's U.S. chief Cheng Lixin previously told Bloomberg that the firm is working with an unspecified European carrier to ship a Mozilla smartphone sometime during 2013.

A Firefox smartphone from ZTE is said to feature a 3.5-inch display that displays a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels, accompanied by 512 MB of RAM, a main 5-megapixel camera and a 1.5GHz system-on-chip.

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Zak Islam
3 Comments Comment from the forums
  • ricardok
    Not that I'm interested in a ZTE phone, but it would be great to see how it performs against the major players. I do wonder tho how they can live up to the hype without an "app store" of sorts.
    Reply
  • alterecho
    That really is a smart name for the OS' first phone.
    Reply
  • mitch074
    @ricardok: the Mozilla App Store is a bit special: it's not a set of apps for a mobile OS, it's a bunch of "downloadable websites" which can then be run on any HTML5-compatible browser (with Firefox the main rendering engine). See "Mozilla Marketplace" for an idea.
    The novel concept is that you can run the very same application on that MozillaOS, on Android (especially when using Firefox for Android) or on iOS in Safari - provided Safari can run the app - and on your desktop PC (under Firefox).

    Considering that Firefox does JIT javascript compilation, colour space management, hardware accelerated rendering, video and sound compression/decompression, multipoint touch management, advanced controllers input management and accelerated 3D rendering using WebGL (among other APIs that allow better interaction between a website and the browser) this does open a large set of possibilities for app programmers with Web skills.
    Reply