Mozilla held a significant press conference today at Mobile World Congress to talk about Firefox OS and Mozilla’s future in the smartphone market.  Alcatel, LG and ZTE are all definitely in-line to manufacture Firefox OS devices this year, along with them Huawei will also be making a handset for the operating system.

While this is all great news, it is a little bit disappointing for US customers because it seems as though we will have to wait until 2014 to buy a Firefox OS handset in the US.  However, Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Spain, Venezuela and more will be getting Firefox OS phones within the coming months.

The first official device launch will come this Summer when the Alcatel One Touch Fire makes its way to Poland via Deutsche Telekom.  The Alcatel One Touch Fire is a very low-spec’d phone with a 1 GHz processor, 3.2 megapixel camera, 256MB of RAM, and 512MB of storage.

Alcatel One Touch Fire

Even though the One Touch Fire is not an amazing device, it will give us the first real feel for the Firefox OS itself.

Now onto software.  Hopefully you were not expecting a mind-boggling App Store to be included early-on with Firefox OS because it certainly does not exist.  As far as Apps go, the normal Apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Cut the Rope, AccuWeather, etc will all be available for download to start with, but not much else.

International Carrier support is quite impressive however, with 18 carriers guaranteed to be offering Firefox OS devices this year.  They include America Movil, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Hutchison Three Group, KDDI, KT, MegaFon, Qtel, SingTel, Smart, Sprint, Telecom Italia Group, Telefónica, Telenor, Telstra, TMN and VimpelCom.