Mozilla To Sell '$25' Firefox OS Smartphones In India

mrspoonsi (2955715) writes Mozilla, the organisation behind the Firefox browser, has announced it will start selling low-cost smartphones in India within the "next few months". Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, the firm's chief operating officer suggested the handsets, which will be manufactured by two Indian companies, would retail at $25 (£15) [note: full article paywalled]. They will run Mozilla's HTML5 web-based mobile operating system, Firefox OS. The firm already sells Firefox-powered phones in Europe and Latin America. Firefox OS has come a long way even in the year since we saw a tech demo at Linux Fest Northwest.

Comments

Any chance at getting one?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

At $25, I'd be in for at least one, just to have a look at this 'firefox OS' in its native habitat (as well as it likely being at least better than most dumbphones in terms of usability, probably not enough screen, for $25, to take on the $100+ 'smartphone' scene. Any chance of these showing up stateside?

A mobile OS that isn't Apple's Garden of Pure Ideology, or linked directly to the mothership in Redmond if you actually want to do much of anything would also be nice to see.

Re:Any chance at getting one?

[Threni]

I predict they'll never be available in the US/UK for anything like that little money. There'll be taxes and import duty and this and that and....and it'll end up being 3 times that, and for the money you'd be able to buy something which less horrific performance. There's no profit in this for anyone - why bother in the first place?

Re:Any chance at getting one?

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

+1 on this one. Mozilla should not commit the same mistake as the OLPC project in restricting sales to selected Third World regions. It should sell the phone wherever there are buyers, if not at your local telco or Walmart, then online. More sales in the West means more phones falling into the hands of geeky bums with the potential and time to tinker/mod the phone into something just a wee bit cooler than the default factory-shipped OS. Will the phone have more juice than the Raspberry Pi? Maybe it could sell to the maker crowd.

Re:Any chance at getting one?

[gQuigs]

How about $100?
Announcement post; https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/...
US store: http://item.ebay.com/291125433...

Re: Any chance at getting one?

[AvitarX]

I got the Motorola e ink phone (with 12 segment characters by 8 or so across) for $25 on Amazon as a back up phone a few years ago, it was a $15 dollar phone for India too.

Re:Any chance at getting one?

[Anonymous Coward]

I never used a smartphone before this one. Would you care to explain what killer features I'm missing out on?

Re:Any chance at getting one?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

At least for contract customers, and often for prepaid, carriers are usually willing to issue a replacement SIM (they might charge 5-10 dollars to do so; but especially for contract customers, why lose a customer over a dinky little crypto IC?) and invalidate the old one.

Not something you want to deal with the hassle of; but not as bad as losing an expensive phone with the SIM in it. (Plus, if your phone is cheap junk, you can still lose/destroy it on your own; but it is less likely to be stolen, which helps increase effective reliability, since most thieves aren't polite enough to pull the SIM before lifting the handset.) As for environmental hazards, SIMs are pretty tough. Unless you physically snap one, give it a particularly stiff hit of ESD, or microwave it, it'll probably be fine. A little salt water, your phone falling a couple of stories onto concrete, and similar mishaps are unlikely to do it much harm.

Re:Any chance at getting one?

[ArcadeMan]

Think you got it bad? Here in Canada they give us the phones for free but it requires a three years contract with a minimum monthly package of 80$.

Re:Any chance at getting one?

[Pax681]

I predict they'll never be available in the US/UK for anything like that little money. There'll be taxes and import duty and this and that and....and it'll end up being 3 times that, and for the money you'd be able to buy something which less horrific performance. There's no profit in this for anyone - why bother in the first place?

Nah .. at under £20 GBP it is under the import tax threshold.. so no import tax on this puppy for Scotland or the UK

What about Apps ?

[singhv]

So developers have to start building apps for this OS ? There are $75 smartphones with android OS available in India. Windows-Nokia phone have not been able to catch up in the India although Nokia was leader at one point of time

For the Fi-curious

[NotFamous]

You can get a Firefox phone right now, available for use in Germany, Russia, United Kingdom, and the United States. It is $99, and comes with a 4-inch screen, dual core 1.2Ghz and 512MB RAM. It is the ZTE Open C, available on eBay. Just search for Firefox OS, and you'll find it.They link to it from the Firefox OS site. http://item.ebay.com/291125433...

Re:Your wish is available now

[gstoddart]

Perhaps you missed the story yesterday where Google was making the app security on Android even less secure, and in such a way as to prevent users from disabling components which would block ads.

Sure, you can install apps from other locations ... but there are some apps you can't install unless you root the phone.

Google is no saint in this regard either. They have some illusions of open-ness, but they also ensure their advertising services and the like can't be selectively disabled.

Hell, the very act of turning on the GPS in my Nexus 7 causes Google to prompt me to say yes to their own location services.

Android stuff are almost as directly linked to that particular mothership as Apple or Microsoft.

Re:Your wish is available now

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

My typo, I'm afraid (I meant Mountain View, though Windows Phone devices are tied pretty closely to Redmond); but Android solves the problem rather less than it pretends to.

Unless you hack around and run bare AOSP, possibly with certain 3rd-party customizations, the percentage of 'Android' that is actually 'Google Play Services' increases with every version bump. A nontrivial percentage of even non-Google apps also build against Google-specific APIs, rather than the relatively impoverished Android ones (the rule of thumb seems to be that, once a role is added to GPS, the AOSP implementation more or less freezes at whatever state it was in and remains there), so incompatibility, even with the absolute freshest AOSP, is quite common.

Google has the right to do as they wish with their OS, and at least you can buy it on handsets that aren't crypto locked to hell and back; but you'll be talking to the mothership soon enough.

Re:Your wish is available now

[MightyYar]

Damn, you know you are right! I confused my Samsung with an iPhone because of the rounded corners.

Re:Your wish is available now

[Kjella]

A nontrivial percentage of even non-Google apps also build against Google-specific APIs, rather than the relatively impoverished Android ones (the rule of thumb seems to be that, once a role is added to GPS, the AOSP implementation more or less freezes at whatever state it was in and remains there), so incompatibility, even with the absolute freshest AOSP, is quite common.

Or the TL;DR version: Embrace, extend, extinguish. Companies are not your friends, they're temporary allies as the underdog seeks to become top dog but will abandon you when they no longer need your support. They make more money that way.

FireFox OS

[Psicopatico]

FireFox OS is an ok OS.
Pity it lacks a decent browser...

(Sorry, but that HAS to be written)