This year’s CTIA Wireless conference in New Orleans is surprisingly short on major new smartphones. But at last night’s MobileFocus press event, I happened across a fascinating, one-of-a-kind handset which I hadn’t seen in person yet: Mozilla’s alpha version of a phone running Boot to Gecko, its project to turn the web technologies behind Firefox into a stand-alone mobile operating system.
Mozilla took a Samsung Galaxy S II phone running Android and stripped off Android. Then it installed its own version of Linux with software for standard phone functions such as dialing and camera access, a web app store and a user interface powered by Gecko, the Firefox rendering engine. Apps for it are written using HTML5 and other standard web technologies; they can store stuff on the device itself or in the cloud, making the phone useful whether or not it has an Internet connection.
Oh, and its browser is — wait for it! — Firefox.
Read more:
http://techland.time.com/2012/05/09/this-phone-is-all-firefox-all-the-way/#ixzz1uTuL2Sb3
