BARCELONA, Spain — Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox mobile operating system, has announced a major new partnership with Spreadtrum, a Chinese chip set manufacturer, in a move that promises to usher in the era of ultra-affordable smartphones. Mozilla's new $25 smartphone is being touted as a brand new pathway to underserved users without the cash to pony up for what is traditionally a more expensive smartphone option compared to a flip phone.

"Everyone else is trying to make iPhone competitors," Andreas Gal, vice president mobile for Mozilla, told Mashable. "For example, every release of Android continues to try to compete with the iPhone, so it moves the entire Android ecosystem up in terms of price point. As a result, manufacturers have essentially vacated the space of entry-level priced smartphones."

Gal's sentiments reflect a trend at this year's Mobile World Congress toward introducing lower-priced smartphones designed to capture the next big wave of potential users in nations with large low-income populations.

"If you look at the opportunity it's huge," says Gal. "Billions of people out there are looking to get online and get connected, and they're all in a part of the world where the iPhone is only financially viable for a very small segment of the local population. So now, for $25, this is the other alternative… We 're really not interested at all in competing with the iPhone.

Huawei also gave the public its first look at the company's Firefox smartphone. The understated handset offers a 4-inch screen, a 5-megapixel camera and a 0.3 megapixel front-facing camera, and 512 megabytes of internal memory, all running on a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor. Also on display were Firefox phones from Alcatel, ZTE and traditionally high-end smartphone manufacturer LG.

Huawei debuted its new Firefox OS smartphone on Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Image: Adario Strange, Mashable

Because Mozilla's $25 smartphone is a reference design targeted at OEMs, there's no hard date for when we'll see this ultra-low-priced smartphone hit the market, but the Spreadtrum deal means we'll likely begin seeing these handsets appear on the market in the very near future.