Mozilla has announced its plans of launching a $25 smartphone powered by its Firefox OS mobile operating platform in India and Indonesia sometime this year and with that it will not only give a tough competition to Android smartphones, it will also likely give feature phone vendors a run for their money.
In a feature phone dominated market like India smartphone vendors have been long trying to dole out smartphones that are cheaper and affordable. Local vendors like Spice, Micromax, Videocon and others have managed to achieve impressive sales figures, but with smartphones accounting for only 9.8 percent of 933 million mobile subscribers, there is a lot of pie still remaining for everyone to eat.
This means that there are still over 800 million feature phones in use and a huge opportunity for vendors with budget smartphones to sell their warez. However, India is a price conscious market and according to latest figures from IDC over 78 percent smartphones shipped in Q1 2014 were below $200 price range.
Quite a few vendors have already released smartphones for as low as $100, but considering that feature phones start at ~$18 the price difference is still huge – and there are obvious drawbacks like battery life, bulkiness, and technology unawares that hamper smartphone sales in India.
Mozilla with its $25 Firefox OS smartphone is definitely targeting the feature phone userbase in India and an additional $5 as compared to a feature phone’s price isn’t a huge jump when one weighs in the extra features that the smartphone one will provide. Mozilla is quite confident about the success of its $25 smartphone and is expecting to sell 10 million units in 12 months.
“With a $25 price tag, there is no price gap between a smartphone and a feature phone. This attractive price point would help motivate feature-phone users to switch to smartphones,” said Mozilla Chief Operating Officer Gong Li.
Other vendors may claim that Firefox OS lacks apps, but considering that Mozilla isn’t targeting other smartphones it hasn’t got a lot of ground to cover. Further a lot of developers are showing interest in the platform and the number of apps will always increase as time passes by.
