More than a year has passed since The Costa Rica Star first reported on an announcement by Spanish telecommunications giant Telefonica about its partnership with the Mozilla Foundation and smartphone manufacturers Alcatel and ZTE to make the Firefox OS mobile phone a reality in Latin America. Since then, sightings of the vaunted Firefox smartphone have been reported in South Africa, Greece and the Philippines, and a recent report by wireless industry journal Telecompaper even indicates that Movistar would offer the Alcatel One Touch Fire in Costa Rica starting the first week of December; however, nothing else seems to indicate as much.

Since Telefonica is the parent company of Movistar in Costa Rica, it would stand to reason that they would have information about the Firefox smartphone; alas, their online catalog is devoid of Alcatel products.

The Costa Rica Star even visited a Movistar Centro de Atención Presencial (branch office) located near the Juan Santamaria Monument in downtown Alajuela, and the nice employees and helpful employees therein did not know about the Firefox smartphone. They were quick to point out, however, that they were running a special promotion: For each Huawei Ascend P7 extra-large smartphone purchased, Movistar would throw in as smaller Huawei Y221 for free. Such promo would run about $590 cash; but, those two smartphones run on the Android operating system, not Firefox.

Since the mystery of just when the Firefox smartphone will arrive in Costa Rica remains, we can only look towards other markets to get an idea of pricing. According to The Register in the United Kingdom:

Phones based on the Mozilla Firefox platform have been targeted at far flung places such as Bangladesh and Brazil, but now a major European network has them for sale.

Cosmote is the biggest mobile network in Greece, is 40 per cent owned by Deutsche Telekom, and has just started selling the 3.5-inch Alcatel One Touch C, and the 4.5-inch Alcatel One Touch Fire E. The bigger phone sells for €109 and the small one for €89.

Pricing is, of course, not known for the Firefox smartphone in Costa Rica at this time, but it is interesting to note that Movistar sells its own brand of very basic Android cell phones for less than $80.