Firefox OS Gets Developer Preview Phones

Mozilla has announced that Firefox OS, their mobile operating system built around the web with HTML5 applications, have announced developer phones. These developer phones are hardware intended to be used when developing for Mozilla's mobile web operating system.

Mozilla has already made available a Firefox OS Simulator to run from your web-browser and Firefox OS is available for tinkering with your own hardware, but now you can get a Firefox OS Developer Preview device.

This developer phone is being made by Geeksphone and Telefonica. The hardware for this developer/preview phone isn't too exciting. The phone comes down to a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S1, UMTS+GSM connectivity, 3.5-inch HVGA Multi-touch, 3 Megapixel Camera, 4GB ROM, 512MB RAM, MicroSD, and 1580 mAh battery. About the only desirable feature with this hardware is that the phone is fully unlocked. There's two phone models to be launched beginning next month with fairly similar specifications. Unfortunately, no pricing information has been revealed, but will likely come at a premium.

More details on the first Mozilla Firefox OS hardware can be found from this Mozilla.org blog post. Firefox OS prides itself on keeping the web open, being a simple OS with applications being written in HTML5/CSS/JavaScript/new-WebAPIs, and freedom by not locking users into vendor-controlled ecosystems.