All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
In 2003, Mozilla liberated Earth's web users from Internet Explorer with the Firefox browser. A decade later, it wants to do it again -- for smartphones -- with Firefox OS.
But there's a twist in the fox's tail: the non-profit has developed a $25 (£15) Firefox OS smartphone for the same developing markets for-profit companies such as Nokia are feverishly trying to marry, profit margins in tow. "Billions of people are coming online," Johnathan Nightingale, VP of Firefox, reminds Wired.co.uk at Mobile World Congress, "[but] they're not going to do it with an $800 smartphone."
Enter Firefox OS, a free operating system built on web-based technology Mozilla has been developing for three years. Alongside Chinese chip designer Spreadtrum, Mozilla has developed a smartphone that will run it, with components so affordable it can cost a customer $25.
It's up to hardware-makers to take this reference design and build the devices, but Mozilla has proved the design is a feasible venture. The reference phone shown to Wired.co.uk is distinctly budget in its appearance; but it's responsive to use, modest but not unattractive in appearance, and comes with all the features of higher-end Firefox OS devices on show. These include calling and texting, social networking, music and video playback, a camera, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, plus of course email and a web browser. It has an entry-level 1GHz processor from Spreadtrum paired with 128MB (yes, megabytes) of RAM and a 3.5-inch capacitive touchscreen. It also supports dual SIM cards.
It's basic, but it doesn't feel sluggish and convoluted for its meagre size like some super-basic Android phones do. It does what it says it will do, does it well, but nothing more. "It's a 3.5-inch screen and that's okay because you're talking to people who, if they have any cellular device at all, [have] a feature phone," Nightingale said. "That market doesn't need a 6-inch screen."
The brainwave moment
The idea for Firefox OS itself as a low-powered alternative to Android came about as a result of Mozilla trying to get Firefox to perform well on Android. "We were building Firefox for Android and we were looking at the memory pressures [...] and a couple of the founders of the project sat down and thought they'd got to the point the web could run a smartphone," said Nightingale. "I don't think $25 has always been the focus. But certainly figuring out ways to use our technology to push the web further out has always been part of the programme."
We questioned whether this low level of specification meant the device would struggle to run the higher-end apps written for more powerful Firefox phones. Nightingale likened it to the early days of the internet. "My first web browser-equipped PC was probably 33MHz with 32MB of RAM -- less than a $25 smartphone," he said. "The web has a long history of having to scale up and down based on your device. Before Firefox OS, people had browsers on Android or iOS devices [...] and if you wanted to address those people even in the first world you had to make [websites] adaptive."
Being adaptive is something modern web tools are very good at.
Every app on Firefox OS is web-based and uses the HTML5 ecosystem for development, meaning open standards for app development and no need for proprietary app stores, unlike much of the competition. If you even want to call it competition, that is. "What Nokia's doing with Android is interesting," said Nightingale. "I haven't seen an Android device at that kind of price point ever, and the ones I've seen aiming for those price points tend to be a poor experience.
It's clear they're going after a similar market. "We don't have to compete with them," Nightingale added. "We don't have to beat them." In fact, Nightingale laid down a proposal: "I would love to see Google co-opt our model and allow web apps into the app store as first-class citizens."
The future
Cracking the "growth markets" -- areas such as China, Russia, South America and other regions seeing a rising adoption of smartphones -- with low-end devices is becoming an enormous trend.
Nokia's announcement of its Nokia X line of Android phones is a firm step in this direction, allowing the company to sell smartphones with more capabilities than its successful Asha line in developing regions, but without the price tag of its premium Lumia range.
Similarly, companies such as Datawind are increasingly investing in super-affordable mobile devices. Datawind is in collaboration with One Laptop per Child (OLPC) to develop a £50 solar-powered tablet, while developing its own £25 Aakash Android tablet. Both are targeted heavily at the education market.
It's early days for Firefox OS, and earlier still for the $25 smartphone concept. There will be room for huge flexibility of design and price points as Mozilla develops the platform. Hardware makers will be able to take the budget chipset from Spreadtrum but change the components around it, leading to larger screens or batteries, better cameras and connectivity, and other changes. For example, Mozilla's reference design doesn't include 4G. But in Rwanda, 4G is rolling out steadily already. Elsewhere, users are not just asking for dual-SIM support, but triple-SIM; and Nightingale said Mozilla's own market research revealed a small pocket of users even buying off-market quad-SIM devices. It wouldn't be a huge jump for a manufacturer to address this with a phone that supported this connectivity while maintaining other specifications to keep the price super-affordable.
Interest from manufacturers has begun, with major Indonesian phone-maker Polytron already announcing its intention to develop the phone, although release dates have not been outlined.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the UK is not one of Mozilla's target markets for such a low-end product. "But we don't launch the phones," said Nightingale. "We build the platform. The operators launch phones."
How about it, EE?
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
