Today's turning out to be a pretty big day for Mozilla and Firefox OS. Earlier we learned that the first Firefox OS-powered smartphone will arrive on store shelves tomorrow, July 2, for just €69 ($90 USD). Now a Mozilla executive has confirmed that smartphones aren't the only devices that we'll see Firefox OS on, as there are also some tablets in the pipeline that run the OS as well.
Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich confirmed today that a Firefox OS tablet is in the works and that it'll arrive "soon." Eich wouldn't say exactly how soon "soon" is, but he did say that Mozilla is "moving aggressively" to get Firefox OS onto tablets as soon as possible. The exec went on to say that Mozilla originally thought that developing for tablets would be easier, but that the company ultimately decided to turn to smartphones first due to developer interest in handsets and the easy availability of Android, a platform that could help development of Firefox OS take place.
As I've noted before, Mozilla's goal with Firefox OS is to help make smart devices accessible to a wider range of consumers. The €69 ZTE Open shows that Firefox OS is capable of powering some pretty affordable hardware, and it'll be interesting to see what kind of tablet hardware Mozilla and its partners can put together and what price point that they can hit. What do you think of Firefox OS so far? Do you think that the combination of low-priced hardware and HTML5 apps will help Firefox OS to gain some traction in the mobile market?
Via Computerworld
