mozilla boot 2 gecko on phone
Android, iPhone, Windows Phone 7 and Blackberry OS (yeah, it’s not dead yet) are the 4 major ecosystems of mobile operating system right now. Now, how about welcoming another player to the market?
Mozilla, the team behind Firefox wants to step in the business as well with its own operating system currently known as B2G aka Boot 2 Gecko (just a codename right now). It will be a complete operating system based on HTML and might even depend on the cloud for storage purposes. (Sounds like Chrome OS?)
The video above demonstrates Boot 2 Gecko on a phone showing the basic features. The user interface is known as ‘Gaia’ which make up the UI for the Boot to Gecko project. As the video shows, the UI is quite slow in some areas, but we cannot complaint as B2G is still under development. Further, the phone runs a ridiculously slow 600Mhz processor, though that’s only to show the possibilities of the OS even on a slow phone. Mozilla has already opened the gates for developers to submit their web apps.
Personally, I see it as a very ambitious plan of Mozilla to target against the biggies who are already dominating the mobile world. And seems like Mozilla understands this fact very well. They’ve partnered with Telefonica, a telecommunications provider in Europe and Latin America, to build phones at very cost. How low? Well, about 10x cheaper than iPhones! That equals to a smartphone under just $100.
This is a strategy Amazon is following with its Kindle Fire tablet which costs 3x lesser than standard tablets and has been successful in winning over 14% of tablet market share in less than a year, a figure that other Android tablets are struggling to reach because of their high prices.
So, who knows this strategy might prove successful to Mozilla as well? After all, who won’t want to own a smartphone at such low prices. Would you like to buy one
