Over the weekend, Nokia released a new feature phone, the 8110 4G – a re-imagining of the phone used in The Matrix. I really like the design of this phone, and at a price of just â‚¬79, it looks like a steal. The most interesting part of the phone, other than its lovely design, is the operating system it runs. It’s called KaiOS, a distant cousin to Firefox OS.

KaiOS is not Firefox OS. Our platform is based on the original Mozilla project. We even have people from the original Mozilla team in our engineering and UX departments. But KaiOS has been developed into something much more robust and expanded than the original Firefox OS. Think of us as distant cousins, not siblings nor children.

It’s a HTML5-based operating system already in use in a whole bunch of phones today – they claim it’s already on 30 million phones in India and North America – and on the 8110 4G, it has that traditional, classic Nokia design with a modern touch. I’m really curious to see just how powerful or expandable (maybe even hackable?) this feature phone platform is.