Items tagged with Firefox OS
In early December, Mozilla pretty much confirmed that the end was near for Firefox OS on smartphones. “Firefox OS proved the flexibility of the Web, scaling from low-end smartphones all the way up to HD TVs,” said Mozilla SVP of Connected Devices Ari Jaaksi at the time. “However, we weren’t able to offer the best user experience possible and so we will stop offering Firefox OS smartphones through carrier channels.” This week, Mozilla solidified those plans to axe Firefox OS for smartphones by announcing that support will be yanked in the coming months. “We are announcing our plan to end-of-life support for smartphones after the Firefox OS 2.6 release,” said Mozilla’s George Roter. “This means...
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We saw this move coming from a mile away. It’s hard as hell to break into the smartphone OS market, especially with dominant players like Android and iOS taking up a lion’s share of the market. Even existing players that once had sizable piece of the pie — i.e. Windows Phone and BlackBerry — have seen their market share drop down to the low single-digit realm (or lower in the case of BlackBerry). With that in mind, Mozilla already had an uphill battle to fight. Earlier this year, the company announced that it was cancelling its effort to produce a $25 Firefox phone. The company explained that having a rock-bottom price is not enough to make a dent in the smartphone marketplace. "We will build...
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I was really looking forward to Matchstick, the first HDMI streaming dongle based on Mozilla's open source Firefox OS. Unfortunately, its developers are putting the word out that they're cancelling the successfully funded Kickstarter project due to difficulties with digital rights management (DRM). On the bright side, if you can call it that, the Matchstick team promised to refund 100 percent of all pledges. Matchstick raised over $470,000 from more than 17,000 backers on Kickstarter. The developers set a goal of $100,000, and with the extra support, they committed to adding Local Play and Ad Hoc mode, two of the most requested features. Local Play would have allowed Matchstick owners to play...
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Having failed to put a dent in the smartphone market with its modest $25 offering, Mozilla has decided to overhaul how it goes about this whole mobile thing. According to a new email from Mozilla CEO Chris Beard, the company is changing its strategy to an "Ignite" initiative that's going to focus on selling phones that have actual redeeming features -- not just a super low price. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be targeting Apple anytime soon, but it does want to provide compelling features and performance to lure people over. That simply wouldn't be possible with a $25 handset. Credit: CNET/Stephen Shankland Perhaps the best news about all of this is that Mozilla isn't turning...
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Low cost and convenient streaming solutions are become pretty plentiful these days. One of our favorites in this category is Google's Chromecast dongle, which we liked at the outset (see our review) and has continued to improve with feature updates ever since. Perhaps inspired by what Google has done, Mozilla is said to be working on a streaming device of its own, only it will be powered by its own Firefox OS. Mozilla is mostly hush-hush on the project, though there is a prototype making the rounds to a select (and small) group of developers. Janko Roettgers over at Gigaom claims to gotten his hands on a prototype and notes that there are still a bunch of unanswered questions that need to be...
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It may not make headlines very often, but rest assured, Mozilla is hard at work developing its Firefox OS, which it will undoubtedly show off at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona next month. Mozilla's hope is that more Firefox OS devices will penetrate the market, and getting the OS onto tablets is a big step in that direction. Even bigger is scoring Foxconn as a manufacturing partner. Foxconn is a major force on the manufacturing side of things with a long list of clients that include Apple, Dell, IBM, Microsoft, Nokia, Panasonic, and several other tech titans. That list now includes Mozilla, for which Foxconn will build reference tablets based on Firefox OS. "We are launching a new contribution...
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Mozilla's efforts to flesh out and promote its Firefox OS for new mobile devices got a shot in the arm today with VIA announcing an official partnership with the browser and operating system maker. VIA says it will help support and develop Firefox OS for new device form factors, and the company's also providing incentive for coders to patch up existing bugs on its own devices. Now that Firefox OS is running on APC's low-cost Paper and Rock boards with buildable source codes available to developers on GitHub, VIA says it will give away free APCs to anyone who fixes a known issue, a list of which is posted on GitHub. APC Rock ($79) is a complete redesign of the the original APC 8750 designed to...
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LG is known for turning out some pretty nice Android devices, but in an effort to try something new, the South Korean handset maker just introduced its first Firefox OS-based phone called Fireweb. It's the second Firefox OS device to hit the market, the only other one being the ZTE Open, which was launched back in August. Though LG wasn't the first to market with a Firefox phone, the Fireweb is the first one that boasts an LED flash for its 5-megapixel rear-facing camera with autofocus. Other features include a 4-inch display with a 480x320 resolution, 1GHz Qualcomm processor, 4GB of internal storage (expandable via microSD), Bluetooth, Wi-iFi, GPS, 3G connectivity, and 1540mAh battery. The handset...
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It's only been a few weeks since the first Firefox OS phones were released to retail, and already there's an update to Mozilla's mobile operating system. Depending on how you look at it, that bodes well for the future of Firefox OS, in that it shows Mozilla is committed to the operating system (Mozilla previously stated it was planning an "aggressive" release schedule for updates). This particular update adds several new features, ushers in support for additional languages, and speeds things up across the board. The feature list is relatively long for a 1.1 update (meaning more than just one or two tweaks). Some of the things it includes are MMS support (you can now send and receive pictures,...
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Mozilla may have found an ally in LG, a major player in the smartphone market. During an interview with Bulgarian online outlet Dnevnik.bg, LG's mobile communications boss in Bulgaria, Dimitar Valev, spoke about his company's future endeavors, including plans to launch a mobile handset based on Mozilla's Firefox OS. Valev said the South Korean handset maker will make a concerted effort to increase its brand image and cost effectiveness. That means being conservative in the ultra competitive tablet field where LG isn't an established player, though the company does plan to launch a slate eventually. In the meantime, LG will continue to make Android phones, will explore diving into Windows Phone...
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One of the things that helped Mozilla's Firefox browser gain a following is that it's constantly updated. While Internet Explorer (IE) remained stagnant for years on end, here came Firefox with a bunch of new features, and these days Mozilla rolls out new releases at a breakneck pace as part of its rapid release schedule. Expect something similar with the open source team's Firefox OS for mobile. Firefox OS won't see the same number of updates as the browser but you can expect quarterly refreshes, as well as frequent security fixes. "Now that we have our v1.0 behind us and we’re moving forward with even more partners, we’re going to do our best to bring Firefox OS back into our heartbeat...
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At the start of the month, we reported that Spain's Telefonica had launched the first Firefox OS-based phones using Chinese manufacturer ZTE's hardware. At the time, Mozilla had oddly kept mum about things, but today, it's finally opened up, over at its official Mozilla Hacks blog. Mozilla's Robert Nyman states, "Almost two years ago, we announced Boot to Gecko (B2G) here on Mozilla Hacks. We discussed the aims of the project and the work we were planning to do. Today, all that work has paid off and we now have official Firefox OS devices in store!" Indeed. From concept to reality, a launch of a product like this is impressive, especially given the landscape we're dealing with. Android reigns...
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Is the world really ready to shift from native apps to HTML5 Web apps? Probably not, at least not in North America, but developing nations may see it differently. That's the hope with Firefox OS, a web-based operating system that's (in theory) a lot more open. Of course, one needs only look at Microsoft's battle to get Windows Phone into a place of competition to realize that gaining market share is no easy task, which is why Mozilla will soon be handing out Firefox OS developer phones in order to bolster that. The goal is to get app builders to build for Firefox OS, so Mozilla is sending out free Preview handsets for folks to tinker with. Here's the pitch: "When Firefox OS phones become available...
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Is the world really ready for another mobile OS? Palm tried with webOS and eventually caved, and items like Bada and MeeGo haven't had much success, either. But Firefox OS, which saw its big start at Mobile World Congress, seems to have incredible ambitions. Sony and Telefónica announced that they were evaluating the Firefox operating system for mobile phones, and now they're putting their money where their mouths are. Already, Sony is releasing an experimental version of the Firefox OS software for Xperia E, giving curious developers the ability to test out the new OS on some pretty choice hardware. Firefox OS is a new mobile operating system built entirely upon open web standards, and...
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Mozilla's upcoming phone OS, Firefox OS, has seemingly matured a lot these past six months, and with today's announcement of developer phones soon to be available, its final release can't be too far off. Developed by Geeksphone, the "Keon" and "Peak" models are designed to allow developers to dive head-first into getting their apps ready for the platform - with Mozilla itself focusing heavily on HTML-based ones. The Keon model features a Snapdragon S1 SoC at 1GHz, a 3.5-inch HVGA display, 3 megapixel camera (back), a 4GB ROM and 512MB of RAM, microSD, light and proximity sensor, a g-sensor and 1580mAh battery. The Peak, by contrast, boosts the display to 4.3-inch qHD IPS, the SoC to an S4 1.2GHz,...
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Want to take Mozilla's upcoming Firefox OS for a spin? You're in luck, because the developers have released a simulator called "r2d2b2g", or b2g for short, that allows you to install an .xpi extension inside of a desktop version of Firefox and see what it is that Mozilla has up its sleeves. Once the .xpi is installed, you'll be greeted to a dashboard (seen below) where you'll be able to turn the simulator on and get into action. A pop-up window will appear with a recent build of Firefox OS running inside of it. As a simulator, you'll be able to use the OS inside of this pop-up much like you would on a regular phone. This simulator isn't like a virtual machine, where functionality is cut-off....
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Ready or not, yet another mobile operating system is about to join the fray. Perhaps you've heard of Firefox OS, otherwise known as Boot to Gecko (B2G). Firefox OS is Mozilla's attempt to approach the mobile scene in a different way, one in which apps run in HTML5 and nothing else. Short and sweet, Mozilla wants to shake up the mobile OS scene the same way it did the browser market many years ago, and it's well on its way to doing that. Sprint is reportedly on board to support Firefox OS, and so is Deutsche Telekom, parent company of T-Mobile. The significance there is that you could very well end up seeing Firefox OS phones shipping next year, and given that apps are totally invested in HTML5,...
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