The IT Nerd

Everybody is jumping into the phone market. The latest entrant is the Mozilla who announced on Sunday that they’re going to be releasing phones with a Firefox based OS:

The Mountain View, Calif.-based foundation said Sunday that phones running Firefox OS will appear this summer, starting in Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela.

Why would they do that? Here’s a good reason:

Mozilla Foundation has an ally in phone companies, who are interested in seeing an alternative to Apple and Google, particularly one coming from a non-profit foundation. Thirteen phone companies around the world have committed to supporting Firefox phones, Mozilla said, including Sprint Nextel in the U.S., though it gave no time frame for a release. Other supporters include Telecom Italia, America Movil of Mexico and Deutsche Telekom of Germany. DT is the parent of T-Mobile USA, but plans to sell Firefox phones first in Poland.

It will be interesting to see if they can make it work. This is a market that is dominated by Apple and Google. I’m dubious if a third player can really make this work. But Firefox has the brand name recognition that may help this work and if the price is right, they may be able to make a go of it. The one thing I’ll point out is that there’s no timetable for the release of this phone in the USA. Strange. I’m not sure how to read that yet. Perhaps it will become clear as plans for this phone moves forward.

This entry was posted on February 25, 2013 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Firefox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.