Don’t Expect Firefox OS Smartphones in U.S. Anytime Soon

Forget about buying a Mozilla Firefox OS-based smartphone in the United States, at least for the foreseeable future.

In what appeared to be a slight about face, Mozilla executive chair Mitchell Baker said a U.S. launch for Firefox OS smartphones was not in the organization’s future, according to a CNET report. Baker’s comments, made at the OpenMobile Summit in San Francisco Nov. 13, seemed to walk back a plan former Mozilla chief Gary Kovacs’ sketched out at Mobile World Congress in February for Sprint to sell the phone in the United States sometime next year.

"Currently, there are no plans to launch in the U.S.," Baker said. Mozilla will have developer phones available in the United States, but that's about it.

Still, there may be some wriggle room left in Mozilla’s sales strategy—Andreas Gal, the organization’s Mobile vice president, said later in a statement that operator and manufacturer partnerships for the U.S. market are being “actively” explored.

Right now, the Firefox OS-based ZTE Open, a lukewarm-reviewed unit geared toward first-time smartphone buyers and priced at about $80, is available only on eBay.

And therein lies the rub. Mozilla’s plan all along was to breach the emerging markets where Apple (AAPL) couldn’t get with the iPhone and phones based on Google’s (GOOG) Android OS couldn’t go—at the low end, where buyers might be more amenable to minimal features at an affordable price.

By comparison, the number of low-cost Android-based devices already available in the United States makes for a hotly contested market where Mozilla wants to play, but the truth is, who wants to say outright they're going to bypass selling in the United States altogether? Viewed through that lens, Mozilla’s hedge is understandable.

Baker said that the importance of price has been underplayed with smartphones. "For most of the world, price is really important,” she said. “But for us, a $500 phone, how many of us have one? How many cents you can shave off the bottom of the phone is the driving factor."

Perhaps most telling, Baker said is Mozilla’s belief that regarding smartphones as computers rather than phones greatly enhances the potential of the devices, particularly with the coming onslaught of a data-driven world where billions of objects and devices house embedded sensors. “So, we want an experience that's seamlessly interoperable with the data," she said.

In July, Mozilla said that it had inked a deal with carriers Deutsche Telekom and Telefonica, with the former promising to expand distribution throughout Europe and the latter kicking off the ZTE Open in Spain for about $90. In all, Mozilla has lined up 17 carriers to sell Firefox OS devices in emerging markets, along with manufacturers Huawei and LG.