Hands on with Firefox OS

As you may have heard, Mozilla has released a test version of Firefox OS that anyone can test out on their local Mac or PC.

I decided to go ahead and take it for a test drive, and although I probably definitely didn’t have everything properly configured and optimized, I came away with a decent impression of how the upcoming mobile OS is designed.

Check inside for our brief video hands-on with the Firefox OS test software…

[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mjHIs2G0IE[/tube]

At this point I can’t really form an opinion; it is beta software after all, and it’s not even running on hardware.

What I can confirm, is that the OS is heavily inspired by iOS. Things like “wiggle” mode, the Home screen, swiping, and other subtleties, confirm this. You can also see the cues taken from Android — the keyboard and swipe down Notification Center styled settings panel both attest to this.

It’s way, way too early to make any assumptions, or to come to any conclusions. What I can say is that Mozilla has a long way to go before even think of competing with Android or iOS. It’s an uphill battle, but at least it’ll be interesting to watch.

If you want to learn more about Firefox OS, you can read more about it from our post yesterday. What do you think?