Firefox OS, Mozilla begins the $25 smartphone

BARCELONA -- Mozilla doubled down on its bet that low-end smartphones will give Firefox OS a place in the crowded mobile market, announcing partnerships Sunday that will bring $25 smartphones to the large number of people who can't afford high-end models like Apple's iPhone 5S and Samsung's Galaxy S5 that cost hundreds of dollars.

At the Mobile World Congress here, Mozilla announced a deal with Chinese chip designerSpreadtrum Communications that will mean Firefox OS smartphones will arrive in extremely cost-sensitive markets like India and Indonesia where people often buy phones from a bin in a store.

"We're working with them to break through the $50 barrier, which is a hard," Mozilla Chief Technology Officer Brendan Eich told CNET. "This is going to be for a set of [sales] channels in Asia that do not involve operators," the carriers that in other parts of the world dominate distribution.

One company that plans to make and promote the phones is Indonesia-based Polytron. And Indian carriers Telkomsel and Indosat plan to sell the devices.

The phones may seem small, underpowered, and short on features to people used to modernAndroid and iOS phones. But Mitchell Baker, chair of the Mozilla Foundation, said at a press conference here that the devices have to be judged by a different, lower-end standard.

"Imagine the phone in your pocket is a feature phone. Imagine, when you go buy one of these devices, that every euro is precious to you," Baker said. Looking at "the richness and power we're able to offer to this market, you'll be astonished. Then imagine where we can go from there."

Mozilla has found a small niche in the mobile OS market by pursuing its low-end strategy, with the first phones debuting in countries such as Hungary, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, and Greece. Mozilla, a non-profit organization, hopes to use the browser-based operating system to lower the barriers that today keep people locked into ecosystems linking hardware, OS, app store, services, content, and apps.

Mozilla also expanded partnerships with the Firefox OS allies it announced last year at the same show, Alcatel and ZTE. They debuted upgraded models that move to dual-core processors and add larger-screen options, bringing a little more processing horsepower to Firefox OS without raising the price.

One of those Alcatel phones, the One Touch Fire S, pushes Firefox OS to new heights a quad-core processor and support for faster new 4G LTE networks. And Alcatel also showed off an early version of a planned new tablet, the One Touch Fire 7.

Alcatel plans to sell its One Touch Fire 7, a tablet with Firefox OS.

(Credit: CNET)

Also at Mozilla's event, a new partner, Huawei, showed off its first Firefox OS phone. The Y300 comes with a 4-inch 800x480 screen, dual-core processor, 512MB RAM, a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera, a 0.3-megapixel front-facing camera, and Firefox OS 1.1. It's not clear yet when that model will go on sale.

LG Electronics introduced a Firefox OS later phone last year, the Fireweb, and didn't have any updates. Sony last year said it planned a Firefox OS phone for 2014, but it didn't have any on display.

Firefox OS takes on challenges
Today, Apple's iOS and Google's Android dominate the market for smartphones and tablets. Challengers like Microsoft's Windows Phone, Ubuntu Touch, WebOS, BlackBerry OS, and Samsung's Tizen have struggled to push these aside: it's hard to compete against an incumbent that's got millions of users, hundreds of thousands of apps, and few signs of the complacency that can open a door for challengers.

At the same time, though, Firefox is pushing, too. It uses the same ZRAM memory compression technique to halve its memory requirement to 128MB of memory, Eich said.Firefox OS won't have an easy time of it. There's not as much money to be squeezed from low-end markets, so developers aren't as likely to pursue it as avidly. The Spreadtrum chipset will support only 2.5G Edge mobile networks that, while common in poorer parts of the world, are too slow for a lot of modern apps. And Google is pushing toward lower-end phones, with Android 4.4 memory-saving techniques that fit KitKat into phones with 512MB of RAM.

Getting down to $25 phones means Firefox OS will provide an alternative for people who'd otherwise buy a feature phone -- a model with a few built-in apps but not much more.

So Firefox has a chance there. But in the long run, to succeed, Firefox OS will need to push up-market, and it's not clear how Mozilla will succeed there with much stronger competition.

Dual-core Firefox OS phones
Phone makers are helping to push Firefox OS toward higher-end models. The first-generation Firefox OS phones like the Alcatel One Touch Fire had single-core Qualcomm processors.

Now that's changing with a host of new models that should arrive at the same low prices. Arriving at the show are two ZTE phones and four Alcatel phones:

• The ZTE Open C has a 4-inch, 800x480 display, a dual-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 processor, 3G networking; 1,400mAh battery, 512MB RAM, 2GB flash storage, and 3-megapixel camera. The Spanish carrier Telefonica will sell it in Venezuela and Uruguay in the second quarter of 2014, ZTE said.
• The ZTE Open II has a 3.5-inch 480x320 display, dual-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 3G networking; 1,150mAh battery, 256MB RAM, 2GB flash storage, and 2-megapixel camera. Telefonica will sell this model in six countries
• The Alcatel One Touch Fire S, the company's highest-end model, has 4G LTE networking, a 4.5-inch 960x540 IPS screen, a quad-core 1.2GHz processor, an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera and 2-megapixel front-facing camera, and support for near-field communications (NFC).
• The Alcatel One Touch Fire E is a step down. It's also got a4.5-inch 960x540 screen, but not with in-plane switching, and its 1.2GHz processor is only a dual-core model. Its rear-facing camera has a 5MP resolution but its front-facing camera is only 0.3MP.
• The Alcatel One Touch Fire C is the clear successor to 2013's model. Its 3.5-inch 480x320 screen is the same size, but it now is accompanied by a dual-core 1.2GHz processor. Its camera is pretty low-end, just a 0.3-megapixel model.

Tablets and more
Alcatel is also the first to push a Firefox OS tablet, the One Touch Fire 7, into the market. Electronics companies Foxconn and Via have worked on reference designs, but Alcatel is aimmig the Fire 7 at the mass market.

It's got a 7-inch 960x540 display, dual-core 1.2GHz processor, 0.3-megapixel front and rear cameras, a 9.9mm thickness, and 285g weight. With those specs, it looks like Alcatel plans reproduce the low-budget Firefox OS phone strategy but this time with tablets.

Mozilla itself will be selling phones, too: a reference design called the for hardware and software partners called the Firefox OS Flame.

It's got a Qualcomm 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor, a 4.5-inch 854x480 screen, a 5MP rear-facing camera and 2MP front-facing camera, 3G networking, 8GB of flash storage, NFC, a 1,800mAh battery. Unusually, it's got RAM that can be adjusted between 256MB and 1GB so developers can test different configurations.

Mozilla's main focus is on smartphones, but it's encouraging others to help push Firefox OS into tablets. Via's 7-inch Vixen 7 and Foxconn's 10-inch InFocus are available to developers who are interested in the area.

The Firefox OS ecosystem is clearly maturing. It's nowhere near the scale of Android or iOS, but the first-stage partnerships announced a year ago are deepening and broadening

smartwatch Gear 2 running Tizen: Smart move for Samsung

BARCELONA, Spain -- Samsung's first move with Tizen may not be big, but it could prove to be pretty savvy.

The Korean electronics giant has been working on Tizen-based smartphones for months, but the first global product to use the open-source Linux operating system won't be a phone. Rather, Samsung on Monday will unveil a new version of its Gear smartwatch that runs the company's Tizen software rather than Google's Android operating system. Introducing Tizen to the masses via Gear may be one of the smartest moves Samsung could make. The reason? Apps.

Smartphones and tablets require app stores with millions of offerings to gain traction with users. Just look at how the lack of apps has hurt Windows Phone and Blackberry and how much money and time they've spent to boost their stores. Samsung also has offered millions of dollars in prizes and funding to get developers to make apps for Tizen.

In the case of the first Gear, Samsung has closely controlled what apps could be on the device, rather than opening the gadget up to the entire Google Play universe of apps. Before launching the device, Samsung sought out app developers and worked with them to create software that would work well with the smartwatch. While it has since opened up its mobile software development kits to developers, Samsung has kept the Gear app store invite-only.The situation is different for smartwatches and other wearables -- at least during these early days. Essentially all wearables on the market have to be tethered to a smartphone to truly work. That means they don't need to do as many things on their own aside from notifications or fitness tracking. And the small screens and overall limitations mean mostAndroid apps wouldn't work on them anyway.

"We need to make sure we're ready to go big," Curtis Sasaki, senior vice president of Samsung's Media Solution Center Americas business, told CNET at the company's developer conference in late October.

Continuing with such an invite-only model for the Tizen-based Gear could help the operating system gain more traction, particularly compared with how a Tizen-based smartphone would do. Samsung wouldn't have to worry about having millions of apps that run on Tizen. It would just need to make sure it had a curated batch of apps that worked really well with its smartwatch, and that's exactly what Samsung is doing, according to people briefed on the Gear 2.

While the developers making apps for Gear 2 sure can tell the difference between the software on the old and new devices, consumers likely won't. Samsung's version of Android on the first Gear barely looked like Android at all.

In addition, with something like Gear, Samsung doesn't need the same carrier support that a smartphone requires. Many wireless companies -- such as Sprint, Orange, and Vodafone -- are part of the Tizen Association, but there also have been some high-profile setbacks. Sprint joined the Tizen Association, quit, but later rejoined. Other carriers, such as Telefonica, have quit and never returned, and even more have expressed concerns about Tizen's progress.

NTT DoCoMo, Japan's largest carrier and an early proponent of Tizen, in January scuttled its immediate plans to launch a Tizen-based smartphone. The company, which said it continues to support Tizen, made the move because of the lack of consumer demand beyond Android or Apple's iOS.

"We [had] been aiming to launch the first Tizen handset by end of March 2014," NTT DoCoMo told CNET in a statement. "However, due to changes in the current Japanese mobile market, where the growth of smartphone sales is leveling out, we have decided to postpone the release."

Tizen's future also came into question amid reports that Samsung and Google had eased some of their recent tension. Samsung reportedly agreed to pare back the bloatware on its Android devices while Google agreed to focus its attention on mobile software, not hardware. The twosigned a cross-licensing agreement, and Google sold its Motorola Mobility business to Lenovo a few days later.

Even if the two companies reached some sort of agreement about software, Samsung clearly isn't giving up on Tizen. Samsung is the undisputed king of Android smartphones, but it still needs an alternative that gives it more control over its own future. The company knows that its future growth increasingly will be tied to software and services, and it has devoted significant resources to honing its skills in those areas.

Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch hits the runway at New York Fashion Week (pictures)

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"Software is something that we're working on continuously," Samsung co-CEO Boo-keun Yoon,told CNET last year. "These days, hardware is important, but that is not enough."

Tizen's entree to the market has been anticipated for a couple of years. Most recently, Samsung planned to launch a high-end, Tizen-powered handset by September 2013, but it delayed the release by several months to the fourth quarter. The delay was partly because it wanted to improve the hardware and partly because it didn't have the apps necessary to launch a new ecosystem. Samsung delayed the phone a second time, saying in November that it would introduce a Tizen smartphone in February.

At least one Tizen phone could make an appearance this coming week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, according to people briefed on the matter. However, it's unclear when or where that particular device will be sold.

Samsung also has said it plans to push Tizen into a broad range of devices, including TVs and home appliances. Similar to wearables, the size of the app store for those products doesn't really matter.

"With Samsung, just bringing [Tizen to] phones is not enough," said Andrew Till, the head of mobile at Symphony Teleca, a company that partners with Samsung and helps companies make apps. "They have to position Tizen as a cross-industry offering."

For now, Samsung's greatest hope for Tizen -- and the way to get the operating system into consumers' homes, almost without them even knowing it -- will come through Gear. Here's hoping more people buy the smartwatch this time around.