Mozilla foundation, which produces the famous Firefox browser and Thunderbird mail client, has announced that 18 mobile phone carriers have signed on for using the new Firefox OS to use with the phones they will be giving out with their subscription plans.
The long list of carriers include América Móvil, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Hutchison Three Group, KDDI, KT, MegaFon, Qtel, SingTel, Smart, Sprint, Telecom Italia Group, Telefónica, Telenor, TMN and VimpelCom.
Firefox OS will come out with phones first in these countries ; Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela, manufactured by Alcatel (TCL), Huawei, LG and ZTE manufacturers at the start. The phones will be able to run HTML5 apps right out of the box.
This is a very strong move from Mozilla – the presence of many gsm providers which are providing service in emerging markets like south america, eastern europe, balkans, asia, will catapult firefox os to the forefront of the mobile phone os market swiftly. Especially with the backing of strong manufacturers like Huawei, LG and ZTE. Which will definitely heat up the competition in the mobile os market. Mozilla also has a strong presence on the web, and would be able to pretty easily advocate its own mobile os to firefox, thunderbird users. The experience of the foundation in mobile browser area would definitely serve their mobile phone os users when they are using their devices for internet purposes.
