Mozilla Boot2Gecko platform hands-on

As the smartphone world matures, revolutionary ideas get harder and harder to come by. Yet, this’s exactly what the Mozilla Foundation brought to the MWC 2012 with its Boot2Gecko platform – a cloud based open-source mobile OS, which looks cool and should perform great on even very modest hardware.

Boot2Gecko is using the latest open web standards for its apps, which means that apps written for it will be compatible with just about any smartphone running the OS, or even every device with an HTML5-enabled browser. And don’t worry – even though the OS itself is cloud-based, you might still use your phone offline and even run apps and games on it – offline caching is a technology already supported by the web standards.

The Mozilla team had the platform installed on a Samsung Galaxy S II and were doing all the demoes on the Samsung former flagship, but the company is actually looking to release a completely different device. Its aim is to produce an ultra-cheap smartphone, powered by a 600 MHz CPU and packing just 256MB of RAM.

Mozilla Boot2Gecko cloud-based mobile platform

According to the guys over at the Mozilla booth, those specs should be perfectly adequate and the performance shouldn’t suffer even one bit. The company is partnering with Telefonica and T-Mobile for the development of that phone and if it has its way, the device should be on the market before the end of the year.

Now check out what the platform actually looks like in the following video.

Not bad, right? And we can assure you the apps feels as good as native even though they are not. We are a bit skeptical about the bit that you can achieve a similar performance with such modest specs, though. It’s not that we find it impossible, but we’ll have to see it to believe it.