Mozilla To Launch $25 Firefox OS Smartphone in India, Indonesia


 

Mozilla has announced that a new $25 Firefox OS smartphone will be released in India and Indonesia later this year.

Mozilla Chief Operating Officer Gong Li confirmed the details in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, explaining the decision:

“One U.S. dollar means a lot of things to consumers in emerging countries,” he said. “It’s difficult to sell smartphones that cost more than US$50 in those markets.”

“With a $25 price tag, there is no price gap between a smartphone and a feature phone,” Mr. Gong said. “This attractive price point would help motivate feature-phone users to switch to smartphones.”

This aren’t the first Firefox OS phones, with ZTE, Alcatel, and LG manufactured sets running Firefox OS already being available in Latin America and some parts of Europe, but at a high price of around $75.

Firefox OS is a some-what paired down smartphone operating system, that uses web standards such as HTML, JavaScript and CSS to deliver apps. The end result may not be as feature rich as an Android or iPhone, however it provides the basic mod cons customers are looking for, including social networking and social sharing.

There are some cheap smartphones in the market currently, at least in South East Asia; I’ve seen basic smart phones in Thailand at around a $50 mark (and Android ones at that) however a new price point of $25 can only be good in driving down prices across the whole industry, while bringing the benefits of the smart phone revolution to emerging markets.

 


Kossi

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