Japan gets Fx0—Mozilla Firefox OS-powered transparent smartphone

Japan has its first Firefox OS Smartphone. Mozilla Firefox and Tokyo-based telecommunications carrier, KDDI, issued the announcement earlier this week, with a posting appearing on the Mozilla blog and with a press conference announcement from KDDI.

The phone will appear "just in time for the holidays," said Mozilla. Just in time indeed. The Firefox OS smartphone Fx0, goes on sale on December 25.

The Fx0 has the latest update of Firefox OS. One sure talking point is the look of the phone. The designer is Tokujin Yoshioka. whose works are on display in art museums around the world. KDDI described the look as futuristic. The look is quite interesting. Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal said the phone embodies openness through its impressive transparent design. Yoshioka managed to deliver a form that creates elegance out of nuts and bolts rather than elegance out of a slick black or white casing. The phone imparts gold-colored Factory Chic, screws and all, versus Milan Chic. The designer created a see-through case and BGR India in its headline called the phone "beautiful." "For a device that is designed for developer-centric audience, the design approach does seem rather appealing," wrote Manish Singh.

According to Tuesday's Dezeen, the phone's designer "captured the beauty of mechanicals inside and incorporated them to the design," in a statement from the designer's studio. "Mechanical parts within the case give a metallic appearance to the design, which is textured across the back to improve grip," said Dezeen.

The OS update includes support for NFC, high speed 4G LTE data communication services and WebRTC. The phone has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor. KDDI said this processor achieves the level of task-processing ability that high-spec smartphones demand. Takashi Tanaka, president of KDDI, said that "KDDI hopes to build the new era of the Web through Web of Things, enabling everyone to create custom connected Web experiences." Adding his praise to the KDDI announcement, Andreas Gal, CTO of Mozilla, said the Fx0 "empowers geeks and other users to become Web creators."

Employing the Firefox OS mobile platform, engineers who program using HTML5, JavaScript, or other languages can develop applications and user interfaces through the Fx0. The phone connects designers: the Framin app allows users to design their own lock screen. Anyone interested in graphic design can create their own custom lock screen by combining Internet information with sensors equipped on the Fx0. Also, said KDDI, this is the first Firefox OS smartphone to achieve Japanese character input using flick and toggle operations. "A more comfortable Japanese character input is achieved by combining with high precision conversion and emoji support."

The Mozilla posting said this launch makes a total of 16 Firefox OS smartphones available in 29 countries.