VIA Partners With Mozilla For Firefox OS

VIA Technologies has announced this morning that they have partnered with Mozilla for providing support and development for Firefox OS on new devices.

VIA and Mozilla already have out Firefox OS for the APC Paper and APC Rock. The APC Paper is a $99 VIA ARM Cortex-A9 800MHz with 512MB DDR3 desktop computer that's built inside a recycled cardboard box. Rock The APC Rock is basically the same VIA ARM Cortex-A9 512MB development board but without the recycled cardboard case and costs $20 USD less. These are VIA's first two Firefox OS supported ARM devices but other products powered by Mozilla's operating system are expected.

Those unfamiliar with the products from the VIA-owned APC can visit APC.io. The VIA press release isn't too exciting and basically outlines the APC and Mozilla plans for supporting Firefox OS.

Besides relying upon Mozilla for support and development, VIA Technologies is also looking towards the community for support. They're giving away the low-cost low-performance APC Firefox OS products to those that first fix the many open issues for APC Firefox OS.

Among the TODO items that could get you a free VIA APC board is HDMI monitor hot-plugging support, an interface to setup LANs, USB external storage support, Ethernet hot-plugging support, TV scaling, and video hardware acceleration support. There's many open items but the ones that can earn you a free APC are the larger issues.

The APC Firefox OS code can be found via GitHub.