This week is Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. All the mobile developers and manufacturers in the world convene to show off their latest wares.
Here are two of the biggest items from the first few days of the conference:
1. Alcatel One Touch Fire
There’s a new operating system in town, and its name is Firefox OS.
It’s open-source and developed by Mozilla, the same company behind the Firefox web browser.
The OS itself has been around in developer and beta forms for a while now, but the One Touch Fire is the first official device to run it.
Unfortunately, the specs of the device leave something to be desired: a single-core 1GHz Qualcomm processor sounds ancient when stacked up to the quad-core processors of today’s biggest phones, as do the 256MB of RAM and paltry 3.2-megapixel camera.
But it’s a new OS entering an increasingly competitive market. Firefox OS’ first job is to make an impression on the consumer, and that means just getting in his or her hands.
The Fire will launch first in China, then Latin America and Europe, sometime in June for an unknown price.
2. HP Nexus…I mean Slate 7
Hewlett-Packard, who have amazingly not gone bankrupt yet, announced the Slate 7, a 7-inch Android tablet stunningly similar to Google’s Nexus 7 is several areas, except for quality.
Ignoring the similar screen sizes, the Slate 7 has a 1.6GHz Arm Coretex A9 processor, 1GB of RAM and a whopping 8GB of storage.
If mindless mediocrity isn’t enticing enough for you, the tablet also sports a 3.1-megapixel rear-facing camera and a microSD card slot.
The one good thing about this device is it runs a mostly un-skinned (unaltered) version of Android 4.1.
The bad news is that it doesn’t run 4.2.2, the latest version of Android, and that it’s a tablet made by HP.
Look, the last time HP made a tablet, it ended poorly for everyone involved. And I’ve written about that particular fiasco ad nauseam since Fall 2011, so I won’t go too far into the specifics of how the biggest laptop manufacturer in the world (granted, under the leadership of an incompetent and under-qualified CEO) took a critically-acclaimed operating system and single-handedly endured its demise.
I’m over it. Really.
It’ll be interesting to see how HP tablets fare with Android instead of webOS. Android is a more developed OS, yes, but Android was behind webOS in terms of stability and quality not too long ago.
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Make sure to check back Thursday for more updates on Mobile World Congress, and, as always, the latest and greatest in tech.
