The rumours of a Boot to Gecko smartphone isn’t a new thing as the rumour that a handset running Mozilla Firefox has been doing the rounds for quite a while, but apparently a Boot to Gecko smartphone actually turned up at the MobileFocus press event, and was a smartphone running Mozilla’s alpha version of a handset running Boot to Gecko.
According to the guys over at Tech Land, they saw the Boot to Gecko handset, which apparently Mozilla stripped a Samsung Galaxy S2 of its Android and installed their own version of Linux, with a web app store, user interface powered by Gecko, the Firefox rendering engine, and standard handset functions such as camera access and dialling.
Apparently the apps for the device were written in HTML5 along with other standards web tech, and as for the browser, well it was Firefox.
The guys say that the end result is a ‘rough draft’ smartphone with software that resembles WebOS, and the Google Chrome OS, and say that Boot to Gecko is open software, and more than likely more open than Android.
However, apparently there no word on just when anyone will be able to purchase a Boot to Gecko handset, which the guys suggest would surface with another moniker than that Boot to Gecko, but apparently Telefonica has said they have plans to release a Boot to Gecko smartphone early in 2013 in Brazil, and that Deutsche Telekom is also involved in that project.
The guys do say though that the Boot to Gecko handset they saw at the event in New Orleans, was too unfinished to form any real opinion about other than it worked.