Budget phone experts Alcatel will be the first to bring a Firefox smartphone to Europe this summer, with the One Touch Fire launched at MWC 2013.
A variation of Alcatel’s existing One Touch smartphone, the One Touch Fire is a dinky and rather basic smartphone with a bright orange finish to match the Firefox logo. It will be the first ever smartphone running the Firefox OS to launch in Europe, with Deutsche Telekom offering it in Poland this summer.
The phone has a 3.5-inch touchscreen, 3.2 megapixel rear camera, 1GHz processor and 256MB of RAM, plus a rather paltry 512MB of storage. Thankfully there’s a micro SD card slot so that you can bump up the storage considerably, making room for tunes, apps, videos and more.
It’s a cute phone with a small and curvy design that’s bound to fit nicely into the palm of your hand, with the Firefox operating system presenting something different in a world where everyone is used to Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry and iOS being the choices.
Using its web expertise Mozilla has built a lightweight mobile operating system for smartphones, with a focus on speed and simplicity. HTML5 plays a big part, with most apps created in this format to minimise loading times and provide a smooth and fluid user experience.
Mozilla revealed at MWC that LG, Huawei and ZTE will also be making and launching Firefox phones, with ZTE’s phone dubbed the ZTE Open. Nine further countries will receive Firefox phones later in the year, although both the UK and the US aren’t included on that list. Mozilla said at its press conference that Firefox OS will make its way to the US in 2014.