Mozilla shared the news today that today 18 operators at Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona have announced their commitment to Firefox OS, which will power the world's first Open Web Devices.

The company also announced the first official Firefox OS handset - titled as the ZTE Open. It features a 3.5 inch display and a Cortex A5 processor, which is not impressive for a 2013 phone launch.

Operators pledging to support Firefox OS include: América Móvil, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Hutchison Three Group, KDDI, KT, MegaFon, Qtel, SingTel, Smart, Sprint, Telecom Italia Group, Telefónica, Telenor, TMN and VimpelCom. Telstra is welcoming the Mozilla initiative as an opportunity to deliver an innovative mobile Web experience to their customers. The breadth of operators now backing Mozilla's Firefox OS demonstrates significant industry support for a fully-adaptable, unconstrained mobile platform.The first wave of Firefox OS devices will be available to consumers in Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela. Additional markets will be announced soon.

They are working with manufacturers Alcatel (TCL), Huawei, LG and ZTE to build the first Firefox OS devices, all powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset.

Firefox OS
Firefox OS offers the performance, personalization and price you want in a smartphone and a beautiful, clean, intuitive, personalized and easy-to-use experience. Firefox OS includes all the things people need from a smartphone out of the box - calls, messaging, email, camera and more - as well as the things you wish a smartphone offered, like built-in cost controls, social features with Facebook and Twitter, location-based services, the Firefox Web browser, new ability to discover one-time use and downloadable apps, Firefox Marketplace and much more.

Firefox OS offers a deep contextual search that will take you to the exact content you want instead of just generic apps in the same category. It will allow far more sophisticated and deeper search capabilities as you can search both within apps and on the Web at the same time, which is not possible with native apps. For example, search for your favorite music artist and get results to buy your favorite song, concert tickets or even listen to your favorite song instantly.

Page 2 >>