14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla has just announced that Brazil will be the first country to have phones running Boot to Gecko (B2G) open source platform.
According to Brazilian site ZTop, Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs made the announcement in Sao Paulo, while highlighting the importance of the partnership with major carrier Telefonica.
Both companies have teamed up to develop HTML 5 applications that could run natively on a phone. Kovacs also confirmed that these Boot to Gecko handsets would be commercially available in Brazil in early 2013.
Recent speculations point to a possible launch event at next year’s Consumer Electronics Show, which is set to take place in January.
If all these rumors prove to be accurate, we might even see the first Boot to Gecko showcased at the Mobile World Congress 2013, in Barcelona, Spain.
“It's an open platform to allow complete control of applications, much like a browser, and applications are installed the way you expect. The difference is that they are created with web standards, and we will have links and clicks between apps, something that already happens on the web today, but not in the applications closed platforms,” said Kovacs.
For the time being, we have no details on what company will manufacture Mozilla’s Boot to Gecko phones and who will sell it, but we can safely assume that, in Brazil, these handsets will be exclusively available via Telefonica.
Pablo Larrieux, chief innovation officer of Telefonica Vivo “expects the first devices with Boot Gecko to be sold by price feature-phones today.” The reason behind this decision seems to be the simple fact that Boot to Gecko is an open platform.
It is also worth mentioning that all Boot to Gecko phones will be sold unlocked because of Brazilian laws, so carriers might not have too much to gain from these. Stay tuned for more updates on the matter.
