Mozilla and Telefónica announced a partnership this morning to develop the Open Web Devices (OWD) platform, an operating system that is based on Mozilla's Boot2Gecko (B2G) project. Telefónica intends to ship the platform on low-cost smartphones aimed at developing markets.

In a blog post this afternoon, Mozilla showed the OWD platform running with a custom home screen implementation on a device that appears to be a hacked Android smartphone. The demo shows several aspects of the OWD software environment as they would work on real hardware. The demo includes a test call and shows features like animated transitions and the on-screen keyboard.

Mozilla also pushed some improvements to its own OWD user interface in the project's public version control repository on GitHub. The update further refines the look and feel of Mozilla's home screen and brought a number of other enhancements compared to the code we tested earlier this month. We tried the latest revision in a Firefox nightly build. In the screenshots below, you can see the updated home screen, the application store, the video player, and other features.

In addition to publishing the demo video, Mozilla's blog post also revealed Deutsche Telekom's Innovation Labs will be joining the B2G development effort alongside Mozilla and Telefónica. The growing roster of partners suggests the platform is picking up momentum.

Screenshots of the updated B2G code