BARCELONA—This phone is revolutionary. The Geeksphone Revolution is the most powerful Firefox OS phone by far, and the first Android phone to actually invite you to completely rewrite the OS. We took a look at Mobile World Congress and sure, it's a niche product, but it's an awesome one.
The Geeksphone Revolution is made of smooth white plastic, with a 4.7-inch, 960-by-540 screen. There's an 8-megapixel camera in a slight bump on the back, and a 1.3-megapixel camera on the front. The phone runs on a 1.6GHz dual-core Intel Atom Z2560 Clover Trail+ processor, the same kind in the Dell Venue 7 and Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 . We've tested those devices, and we're talking midrange performance here, nothing smoking.
But you know something's special when you open up its Android app tray and see the "Superuser" icon. This phone comes pre-rooted. It also doesn't come with any Google apps, although there's an option in the settings for the user to install the search giant's apps. When I asked Geeksphone reps whether the Google apps were properly licensed, they changed the subject.
The other special options in settings are the really exciting ones. "Install zip from external SD" is what Android hackers do to install mods or other builds of Android. Typically, they have to boot a phone into recovery mode to do this; Geeksphone puts that option right out in the open.
And then there's "install another OS." You can download a build of Firefox OS and install it right on your phone. The phone isn't dual-boot, though: if you install Firefox, it will overwrite Android, and then you need to reinstall Android from scratch if you want to run that again.
Could the Revolution even run Windows? It isn't outside the realm of possibility. While Windows Phone won't run on the Intel processor, the Revolution might, just barely, meet the new minimum specs for Windows 8.1 announced at the show: 1GB of RAM and a 16GB MicroSD card for storage. (The key question would be whether the OS needs to be installed on internal storage rather than a MicroSD card, in which case you'd be out of luck.)
Take a look at my hands-on video below to see the Revolution running Android and Firefox OS. The Geeksphone Revolution is available now for $305 from shop.geeksphone.com.