Telefonica Digital said that it is securing global operator support for the development of the "Firefox mobile OS" that it announced at Mobile World Congress this year. The operator has also released a screenshot of a phone built on the OS and added that it would have Firefox OS devices on the market in Brazil in early 2013.
A statement from Telefonica Digital said that it has secured operator support from Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Smart, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, and Telenor for the project, and that the first products featuring the OS would come from ZTE and TCL Communications, the company that owns the Alcatel brand for handsets.
The Firefox OS for mobile devices is built on Mozilla’s 'Boot to Gecko project' which Telefonica said "unlocks many of the current limitations of web development on mobile, by enabling HTML5 applications to access the underlying capabilities of a phone, previously only available to native applications".
Telefónica’s Digital unit joined forces with Mozilla earlier this year to develop a phone architecture that builds phone features as HTML5 applications with web APIs.
The aim is that mobile operators will be able to sidestep reliance on other OS to be able to offer rich experiences at a range of price points, including at the low end of the smartphone price range, helping to drive adoption across developing markets. It's not the first such effort, with previous operator-backed initiatives including the Linux-based initiative LiMo Foundation.
'The introduction of the open mobile OS continues the Mozilla mission to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web for users and developers. As billions of users are expected to come online for the first time in the coming years, it is important to deliver a compelling smartphone experience that anyone can use,' said Gary Kovacs, CEO, Mozilla. 'The large number of operators and manufacturers now supporting this effort will bring additional resources and diversity to our global offerings.'