ZTE and Alcatel unveil first Mozilla Firefox OS smartphones at MWC 2013

The first smartphones running Mozilla’s Firefox OS smartphone platform have been unveiled by Alcatel and ZTE at the 2013 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Mozilla has announced its first-generation handsets will initially be released in Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela.

As a result of Mozilla’s emerging market strategy both of the first two handsets, the ZTE Open and Alcatel’s One Touch Fire, are low cost, entry level devices.

The ZTE Open includes a 3.5-inch HVGA screen, a 1GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, a 3.2-megapixel camera and supports Bluetooth, GPS and WiFi.

Meanwhile, Alcatel’s One Touch Fire includes a 3.5-inch screen and 1GHz processor, with a 3.2-megapixel rear-facing camera, 256MB of RAM and 512MB of internal storage expandable with an SD card.

Mozilla hopes the low-end devices will help it to capture market share in emerging markets ahead of a 2014 release in the US.

In a market such as Brazil, for example, iOS has slipped from 3.2% a year ago to just 1.6% today, with Android on 60.7% (up from 28.9% a year ago), while Symbian continues to be used on 27.9% of smartphones (down from 44.6%).