LG Launches Its Firefox OS Phone Fireweb for $200 91
SmartAboutThings writes "LG has launched the Fireweb Firefox OS smartphone in a joint event with the Telefonica Vivo carrier. The Fireweb Firefox OS smartphone will be available for around $200 and will join the Alcatel One Touch Fire which Telfonia is launching in Brazil, starting today. Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay are the next countries to get it. The Fireweb smartphone is LG's very first Firefox OS device and it increases the small number of OEMs that have released Firefox OS devices on the market. The smartphone has a 4-inch screen with a 480 x 320 display, a 1GHz Qualcomm processor and 4GB internal storage that can be expanded with the microSD card slot by up to 32GB. It has a 5-megapixel cameras that comes with both autofocusing and an LED flash, which is a first for Firefox OS phones."
Hopefully an OEM releases a Firefox OS phone with beefier hardware, but you can't argue with the price.
$80 of phone and $120 of tax (Score:5, Interesting)
The CPU is very poor, also, for $200. The same phone for $80 is almost reasonable.
Blame Brazil's prohibitive import duty. It might be $80 of phone and $120 of tax.
Re:Expense for the Hardware (Score:4, Interesting)
"Personally I'd expect either better components or a significantly better price."
To a large degree, you're paying for both freedom and lack of subsidies.
Android and iOS environments are full of apps that track you and your behaviors behind your back. Despite the lip service Apple and Google give to the practice, both of those OSes were fundamentally designed to allow that. (Otherwise, why isn't there finer-grained control over what information those applications can access? That would be pretty easy to do.)
Firefox OS is different. The company is independent, it is non-profit, it is dedicated to freedom, choice, privacy and security.