Hello, world.
This is Seamus Byrne for CNET from Mobile World Congress 2014 here in Barcelona.
And we're looking at the Alcatel OneTouch Fire Range.
These are the Firefox operating system phones.
And this year, Alcatel is stepping up its partnership with Mozilla to try to elevate these phones from being low-end entry-level ideas to something that might start to challenge in
the mid-tier of phones.
The Fire C is the closest to last year's entry-level Fire device.
There's a couple of small upgrades, a 1.2 gigaHertz dual core processor.
But it's still a half VGA screen.
It's still HSPA+ this year, and it's basically very similar to last year's phone in design, as well.
Design-wise, the Fire E and S run close to the Alcatel OneTouch Idol series of devices, basically being variants on
that range.
The E has a qHD display, 5-point touch dual core 1.2 gigaHertz processor, 512 megs of RAM, Bluetooth 4.0, a 5-megapixel camera, and a VGA front camera.
There's also 4 gigs of internal storage with microSD support.
We haven't been able to see working models of the Fire S or the Fire 7 tablet just yet, but the Fire S is probably a really exciting option that will be a genuine mid-tier device with LTE, NFC, a
quad core processor, 8-megapixel camera.
This is definitely gonna be something very interesting for fans of Firefox OS to see just how far they can start to push things.
Now, this is a mock-up version of the Fire 7 tablet, and this is going to be a quarter HD display device.
So, a very low-end tablet which will actually be selling for just â?¬79.
So, this tablet has a dual core 1.2 gigaHertz processor and a 2-megapixel rear display.
It's low spec, but then,
with the â?¬79 price tag, it's definitely not shooting for the moon, either.
Overall, Alcatel says they don't see Firefox OS as a competitor to Android anytime soon, but they do wanna keep exploring it to see what the strengths of this particular platform might be over the long run.
So, for any HTML5 fans out there, I think the Fire S is definitely gonna be one of those devices worth checking out in order to actually give this a test and really see what it might be capable of down the track.
The Alcatel One Touch Fire C
will be available in early Q2, the Fire E will be available late Q2, and the S will be available in the back half of the year.
The pricing will be the C comes in at â?¬59 or about U.S. $80, the E will be â?¬139 or around U.S. $190, the S will be â?¬169 or around $230, and the 7, the Fire 7 tablet will be â?¬79 which is around
U.S. $110.
So, this has been the Alcatel OneTouch Fire series of devices.
I'm Seamus Byrne for CNET here at Mobile World Congress 2014 in Barcelona.
