Today at the CES show ZTE has announced that they will be working with Mozilla to provide a brand new operating system and smartphone based on the Mozilla Firefox browser. The OS will be for smartphones, the first of which the companies will be hoping to launch in 2013 towards the end of the year.
ZTE have been a powerhouse in the smartphone market for years, providing white label technology to some of the biggest companies in the world, but in the past year the company has stepped out on its own by launching its own ZTE branded smartphones across the company’s native Asia and also the western world.
As of yet there is very little information as to what the partnership will entail but what we do know is that they will be working together to provide a smartphone with the new OS which will then be stocked by an as yet unidentified European network before the end of 2013.
What we can expect is that the smartphone won’t be an all-singing-all-dancing Galaxy S3-rival, as Mozilla has said the Firefox OS will be targeted at emerging markets to begin with, so areass like India, Africa and other such markets. This could be a good start for the companies to test out a basic platform instead of immediately trying to take on Google, Apple and Microsoft in the top dog OS stakes.
We have already predicted that ZTE or its Chinese counterparts Huawei will have a big year in 2013, and at the CES show in Las Vegas the two have been impressing with new products and making waves with their plans for 2013.
We wonder if Mozilla can compete with an increasingly busy field (BB10 will be launching in a few weeks’ time also) but hopefully they can come up with something interesting to fight the battle with.
For more of the latest news from the Consumer Electronics Show 2013 click here>>>