Telefónica and Sony Mobile reconfirmed its alliance with a multi-year agreement to collaborate on commercial and technical ventures. Telefónica has worked with Sony before to distribute its Xperia T, Z and Tablet Z line of devices, and the two companies have agreed to investigate emerging technologies, such as Firefox OS.
Sony's engineers are already reportedly working on HTML5 and Firefox OS phones in a bid to make its products available to a wider base, says Sony Mobile deputy CEO Bob Ishida in a press release (though it does not guarantee a Firefox OS phone, it brings up the possibility): "In addition, we continue to work with our operator partners, including Telefónica, on a development project with an ambition to bring a product to market in 2014."
Telefónica operates in Spain, Europe and Latin America, and it has 1.5 million shareholders on the Spanish Stock Market. Mozilla is already in talks with Alcatel, Huawei, LG and ZTE; the first phones are expected to roll out in foreign markets such as Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela. CEO Gary Kovacs says he doesn't expect Firefox OS to launch in the U.S. until 2014.
Mozilla's business trajectory plan seems to be starting by bringing entry-level phones to smaller, developing markets to create a base and carve out its own niche before facing down the established giants. As of now, it has no chance against BlackBerry, Apple and Samsung's high-end smartphones.
Mozilla touts its OS's Firefox Marketplace, which can be previewed on Android Aurora, and also the 18 carriers who have decided to back Firefox OS and phones. The telecom companies are: 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.
Everything else aside, Mozilla is continuing its tradition of offering loyal users the freedom, security and open-source functionality they've come to expect from Firefox. Most of the applications in Firefox's app store will be built on Web-based technologies, then wrapped in proprietary software to distribute it on other platforms, Mozilla announced in a blog post.
