By Martin Wilson, Appear
Mozilla has just announced a new smartphone costing just twenty-five euros in India. This is an incredible 1%-2% of the price of a ruggedized windows PDA-type device that is still used in many Enterprise Mobility environments. The device will include up to 4GB memory, includes Bluetooth / Wi-Fi and dual-SIM which should be more than enough to support enterprise applications.
The product is one of the first cheap devices running the Firefox OS and aside from bringing the benefits of smartphone technology to consumers it will also likely offer up a whole new range of opportunities for business applications in the Asia region and beyond that until now have been impossible due to the cost of devices.
Current application developers will be looking at the launch with interest – the Indian market is still relatively untapped and potentially huge. Many current smartphone applications may not easily work with the devices. Firstly many of the applications that have been implemented using native Android or iOS SDKs will need to be re-implemented. Secondly – as the devices are intended for markets that currently are dominated by so-called “featurephones” which only offer limited internet accessibility there is the medium term issue of a lack of internet connectivity in the networks to consider.
If the device and the operating system prove popular it will support the ecosystem of HTML5 developers and container-based Enterprise Mobility solutions - such as those enabled by the AppearIQ mobility platform, which is the technology behind MobiCloud.
The ability of applications to work in offline environments (later synchronizing through the platform when connectivity is available) and in a secure container separate from other consumer applications is a key benefit for developers to consider using the platform.
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