Mozilla And Foxconn Plan To Unveil Firefox OS Smartphone June 3

Mozilla has revealed a new partnership with Hon Hai, the parent company of Foxconn, with plans for the manufacturing giant to develop a mobile device that runs Firefox OS. Better yet, we only have to wait until next week to find out what that device is, with Mozilla stating that it will reveal the device on June 3 when the new partnership is officially announced.

Based on some of its previous activities, most would assume the device to be a smartphone, but according to an "industry insider" who spoke with Focus Taiwan, the device to be unveiled next week will "likely" be a tablet of some sort. No details were provided about what that tablet might look like in terms of hardware, but we won't have to wait long to find out either way.

Reportedly, Foxconn is looking to nab up some new clients in light of slower sales amongst several of the companies it currently makes products for, the biggest one perhaps being Apple, which relies heavily on the manufacturing company. Word has it Foxconn is shifting away from contract manufacturing and putting some emphasis on its retail efforts. Such information hasn't been confirmed by Hon Hai, however.

Aside from that, nothing else is known about the device or other pertinent details, but we'll keep you updated June 3 when everything officially gets underway. This announcement follows the quick sell-out of 1,000 Firefox OS Geeksphone handsets back on April 24, which encompassed both the Peak and Keon developer handsets.

On May 9, Mozilla announced "Phones for Apps for Firefox OS," a wordy initiative that would supply HTML5 developers with a free Geeksphone Keon handset, the orange smartphone in the image above. Such a plan was to facilitate the growth of apps for the platform, giving users a decent library worth of apps by the time the first round of commercial handsets hit shelves.

SOURCE: Focus Taiwan