With the developments in the smartphone industry, Spice retail has succeeded to launch India’s cheapest smartphone. This smartphone is available in Rs.2,299 and the most important is, it is powered by Firefox OS. The Spice Fire One has predictable low-end specifications and a very attractive price tag. Though, this is a first launch of Firefox in India, it has recently revealed its plan to expand its market in Latin America and Eastern Europe. This entry of Spice with Firefox in the market of smartphone would surely intensify the competition in the low-cost smartphones.
Called the Spice Fire One Mi – FX 1, the smartphone comes with a 3.5-inch HVGA capacitive touch screen along with a 2 MP rear camera and 1.3 MP front camera. The India’s first smartphone running FireFox OS is powered by a 1 GHz processor and dual-SIM functionality with 2.5 G connectivity. It does not support 3G. This cheapest Spice smartphone is targeted to the feature phone users with the attempt to convert them to smartphones.
It uses the complete suite of Web standards such as HTML 5, WebRTC or RTSP for live video streaming or to convert web pages into applications. This smartphone comes with Single Window Search that helps users search any information or application on the web just with a single click. An advantage of this system is its ‘search and launch’ mechanism which makes it very simple to search and install the applications from the Marketplace. As they are simply modified versions of the website or webpage, downloading application can not be a daunting task for the first time smartphone users. Moreover, unlike other OSs marketplace, developers are not bound to rules for launching applications on Firefox Marketplace. Though Firefox OS has a collection of apps containing Line, Twitter, Facebook and even Candy Crush, it still lacks many other must have applications like Whatsapp.
Firefox has tied up with Intex and Spice recently, in this June to launch 25$ smartphones in emerging smartphone markets. “Our partnership with Spice will be an exciting Firefox OS launch in India,” said Dr. Li Gong, president of Mozilla Corporation. Being a new comer, we can not expect the Firefox OS to dethrone Android, but it may win the attention of the first time buyers of smartphones who are still users of feature phones. There are 71% of Indian feature phone users who want to shift to the smartphones for better facilities that create a massive opportunity for low cost smartphones in India.
Though it is the cheapest smartphone, the success of the device can be measured only after it is in action. There are many Android smartphones available in the market ranging from Rs 2,300 to Rs 3,000 and I guess, the Spice and Mozilla might give them good competition.
