If you’ve been taking note of the smartphone market recently, which all good businesses should, you may have noticed Firefox and their project, Firefox OS for mobile.
Although the OS hasn’t reached the consumer yet, it’s getting awfully close to the OS being available on retailed products, so let’s take a look at Firefox OS and the best features it offers to users.
Firefox will run web-based HTML5 apps
Firefox is an open source software that runs on HTLM5, a language that many of today’s websites are developing for. Everything about it will run on HTML5, making sure that developers can all help make Firefox OS chug along with apps, web pages and many other features that support HTML5. Most mobile operating systems today use native apps, something that relies on the hardware to run smoothly. HTML5 web apps will rely on other factors such as web pages to run. It’s still a developing software, and HTML5 has a few years to go before it’s matured, but it’s new, and web pages are happily adopting it into their coding.
Mobiles using Firefox OS will be Cheap
Although how cheap is a question for concern, one thing that Mozilla haven’t stopped gloating about is the price of new handsets running Firefox OS. This would make sense, as the hardware inside most upcoming FFOS handsets seem to match those of budget phones from 2009 and 2010. However, if Mozilla nail a price between $50-$100, then this will be a phone incredibly handy for developing countries, and for those who need to watch their budget, as we all know how expensive top-end smartphones can cost. For a startup business with a small budget, Firefox OS sounds like a good choice for an employee work phone.
App Porting will be Easy as Cake
A lot of applications on the market are already HTML5, meaning it will be super easy for developers to port over their apps to HTML5. If you’ve created an app with HTML5, this should be good news to you, as you’ll be able to quickly release your app on another OS platform without much stress or effort.
No fragmentation
Mozilla has said that all their Firefox OS handsets will be using Qualcomm chips, and on top of this, because of the low cost of the smartphones, it’s likely most devices will use similar sized screens and resolutions, quite apart from the nightmare that is the Android ecosystem.
Although I’ve yet to have a look at Firefox OS for myself, it sounds like an interesting addition to the market, and although it’s no competition against Android and iOS, and perhaps even Windows Phone or Blackberry, it offers something that most OS’s don’t, which along with the price, gives potential buyers a sturdy reason to believe that a FFOS handset could be the one for them.