Firefox OS is now on two additional smartphones – the LG Fireweb and Onetouch Fire from Alcatel. Both were released by Brazil’s Vivo, a division of Telefônica.
Firefox OS is the mobile operating system developed by Mozilla Corporation, the same technology outfit behind the Firefox Web browser. It’s built atop HTML5 technologies.
Firefox OS-powered smartphones are released mostly in Latin America – for now.
The Fireweb from LG has a 4-inch HVGA TFT touch screen and a 5-megapixel camera. Alcatel’s Onetouch Fire comes with a 3.5-inch HVGA 320×480 pixels display and a 3.2-megapixel camera. The most important feature I’m most interested in in these smartphones is their processor. How powerful is it?
For the Fireweb and Onetouch Fire, the news release only says that they are powered by a 3G, 1GHz Qualcomm processor with 2 GB memory. But there are many 3G Qualcomm processors in the market, so which one is it?
The specs on the home page of Onetouch Fire only says that it has a 1 GHz CPU. The best clue I can find is from the Onetouch, an Android smartphone also from Alcatel that has a dual-core 1 GHz processor. That a newer smartphone running Firefox OS from the same company is called Onetouch Fire is a hint that a key difference between both smartphones is in the OS. and that other processors could be the same or about the same. Bit of information that I gathered elsewhere point to the processor being a Qualcomm Snapdragon 4 Plus processor, with a maximum CPU speed of 1.5 GHz.
At a time when Apple is shipping a smartphone that’s powered by a 64-bit processor and Samsung is selling smartphones with 4 cores, with 8-core models on the way, a smartphone powered by a 32-bit dual-core will likely not attract too much consumer attention in the US and other high-end markets. And that’s probably why Firefox OS-powered smartphones are being launched in countries like Peru, Uruguay, Mexico and Brazil.
Image of Onetouch Fire.
Here’s an introductory video of Firefox OS.
