BARCELONA – Mozilla wants you to know about its Firefox mobile OS. At a press event on Sunday, it introduced seven new commercial Firefox OS devices and highlighted advancements and partnerships that will enable the platform to scale up in 2014.
In the past year, according to the company, Firefox OS devices have gone on sale in 15 markets with four global operators and handsets from three manufacturers and will be expanding into new markets in 2014. Telefonica will build on the list of countries where it's selling Firefox OS phones, with eight more launching this year: Argentina, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Germany, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Panama. Deutsche Telekom will also add four new markets: Croatia, the Czech Republic, Macedonia and Montenegro.
Operator support for Firefox OS also continues to expand, as Telkomsel and Indosat have joined the list of 21 key operators across the globe that support the open Web device initiative. That list also includes partners announced last year: America Movil, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Hutchison Three Group, KDDI, KT, MegaFon, Qtel, SingTel, Smart, Sprint, Telecom Italia Group, Telefonica, Telenor, Telstra, TMN and VimpelCom. No Canadians are on that list yet. The devices in which Firefox’s mobile OS can be found are from Alcatel, Onetouch, Huawei, LG and ZTE, devices which are not available in big numbers in our country.
"In six short months, Firefox OS has more than established itself in the very markets it aimed to address," said John Jackson, VP of Mobility Research, IDC, in a quote distributed to support the Firefox releases. "Today's announcements underscore the platform's rapid maturation and growing ecosystem benefits. New products, tools, categories, partners, features, and extraordinarily compelling price points will reinforce Firefox OS's momentum into 2014. IDC expects year-on-year Firefox OS volumes will grow by a factor of six times in the smartphone category alone."
Also, Spreadtrum has announced WCDMA and EDGE turnkey reference designs for Firefox OS as well as the industry's first chipset for US$25 smartphones, the SC6821, that redefines the entry level for smartphones in key growth markets, the Mozilla release stated. Operators such as Telenor, Telkomsel and Indosat, and ecosystem partners such as Polytron, T2Mobile and Thundersoft have expressed interest.
HUAWEI IS ALSO PUSHING hard to make its handset, tablet, and wearables brand much better known globally among consumers. It even staged a mini-concert (with free Wi-Fi) in Barcelona’s Placa Catalunya on Sunday (pictured above). The company is pumping its MediaPad X1, the world's slimmest 7-inch LTE Cat4-enabled all-in-one phablet, TalkBand B1, a hybrid 'talk and track' companion, and MediaPad M1, an 8-inch entertainment-focused tablet.
"We're excited to unveil our new 4G LTE-enabled MediaPads which, together with Huawei TalkBand B1, deliver the essential pillars of happiness – health, connection to family, contact with friends and access to work – without boundaries," said Richard Yu, CEO, Huawei Consumer Business Group.
Powered by a 1.6 GHz quad-core processor and running on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, the MediaPad X1 (right) provides 21 days of standby time(5000 mAh battery) , over five full days of continuous use and reverse charging. The TalkBand B1 features wireless calling, up to seven hours of calls and 1.4-inch flexible OLED display. It supports Android 2.3+ and iOS 5.0+ compatible devices, and syncs via NFC. The MediaPad M1 features an 8-inch 800 x 1280 HD IPS multi-touch capacitive screen with Huawei SWS technology, dual front-facing speakers and microphones. it supports 8 hours of video playing on a single charge.
BLACKBERRY ALSO announced Monday that its messaging service BBM (it was WhatsApp before WhatsApp was…) will be made available to Windows Phone and Nokia X customers in the coming months. "BBM continues to grow in popularity as millions of people use our mobile platform for chatting and connecting with friends or colleagues, and we are very excited that we will soon welcome Windows Phone and Nokia X users to the BBM community," said John Sims, president, global enterprise solutions at BlackBerry in the press release.
It will be available as a free download from the Windows Phone Store this summer. BBM for Nokia X will be available from the Nokia Store when the Nokia X platform launches this year.
