After Spice, the other Indian company Intex is also bringing out affordable Firefox OS smartphones. Intex has also joined hands with Mozilla to bring the world’s most affordable smartphone, Cloud FX, which could be the first choice of those customers who intends to shift from feature phone to smartphone. The Cloud FX will be priced in the sub Rs 2000 category, and Intex will be targetting this to first time smartphone users in tier II cities and rural areas and is expected to hit the market in first week of August.
Intex has gone a step further and shared certain hardware details of its upcoming Cloud FX smartphone, which will run on Firefox OS. This will be a dual-sim smartphone with 3.5-inch screen powered by 1 GHz processor. The Cloud FX will also feature a a 2.0 MP camera, and would be Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled.
Commenting on the proposed launch, Sanjay Kumar Kalirona, Business Head of the Mobile vertical at Intex said, “Intex association with Mozilla Firefox is a step towards our brand’s promise to offer quality products to our consumers to improve their lives and set industry benchmarks. Intex Cloud FX is aimed at fulfilling the idea of – ‘Smartphone for all’ which will be priced below Rs 2000. This smartphones will be equipped with enhanced phone and browser features of Firefox OS with an access to a rich ecosystem of latest web applications improving users overall smartphone experience at affordable prices.”
After the announcement of Spice and Intex, let us see whether other leading players like Micromax, Lava and Karbonn also jump in the fray of launching Firefox OS smartphones or not. Probably, these companies will watch the developments with interest and if the experiment proves to be successful then they have enough resources to come out with Firefox smartphones at very short notice.
The coming months are going to be quite interesting for the first time buyers of economically priced smartphones.
