Gadgetory

this is Dancy for with the verge and we're here in Barcelona Spain checking out some of the latest things that Mozilla is announcing towards Firefox OS platform this particular device is a new CTE smartphone that's going to be released very shortly within the next month or so to a variety of emerging markets across the world what's most significant about this phone and compared to the earlier firefox devices is it's got a much better quality display it's a higher resolution it's much faster than the earlier devices but it's still very much an entry-level device it's going to be priced around the entry level it's going to be marketed to the first smartphone customer and there's a good chance that we're not going to see this in develop markets such as the US or the UK the other thing that we're looking at here is the latest version of Firefox OS this happens to be version 1.3 it's got a new launcher on here it's powered by the same technology as what powers everything me which is an Android launcher that's been around for a while so it's able to do intelligent searches that search both the phone and the web to give you access to shortcuts and various things depending on the context that you add to the search a couple of the other things that they are adding to this is new ways to multitask between various apps Mozilla doesn't have it in this version yet but a next version will allow you to multitask by swiping across the screen to other open apps but right now you can hold down the home button and then access your your open apps and sort of a card like view overall the entire OS just feels much more complete and faster than we've seen before especially compared to the first Firefox OS devices that were announced here in Barcelona last year the lag is not nearly as great as it was on earlier devices you're able to open apps and change apps much quicker than before it really is a much better experience even though it still considered an entry-level device we should see more from Firefox and Mozilla over the course of this year but we could expect to see devices such as this ZTE and others from Huawei and Alcatel hitting markets next month