Mozilla said it won’t be launching its own hardware to run the in-development Firefox OS when it’s finished, but the company has just announced a “Developer Preview Phone” for putting the OS through its paces. It’s not quite the same as the mystery device we saw sporting Firefox OS at CES, but its specs seem almost as basic. The handset will feature a 3.5-inch HVGA touchscreen and 3-megapixel camera on the outside, with a 1GHz Snapdragon S1 CPU, half a gig of RAM, 4GB of microSD-expandable storage and WiFi, 2G and 3G antennae inside. Sure, that processor isn’t a beast, but an 800MHz S1 does just fine in the Lumia 610. A 1580mAh battery will keep the carrier-unlocked phone running, and Mozilla is promising OTA updates to Firefox OS to keep devs, well, up to date. At the moment, we have no idea how much the phone will cost, but the first units are expected to be available next month.
The developer handset is called the Keon, according to creator Geekphone’s website, and while not mentioned in the Mozilla Hacks blog post, it appears to have a more powerful cousin called the Peak. It’s got a 4.3-inch qHD screen, 8-megapixel back-facing camera (with flash) and 2-megapixel shooter round the front. A 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 CPU and larger 1800mAh battery are within, but storage, RAM and connectivity specs are the same as the smaller Keon. Mozilla may not be formally promoting this as its own dev handset, but it was still included in the picture which accompanied the announcement (see above: the Keon is in orange, the Peak in white). We’re getting in contact with Mozilla to clarify, and will update you when we hear back.
Update: Mozilla has confirmed that both the Keon and Peak are official developer devices.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile
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Source: Mozilla, Geeksphone
