Mozilla has an interesting Seabird concept phone rendering posted to YouTube. It looks great but disappointingly it's not real, contains technology that doesn't yet exist at the consumer scale, and is built on top of Android.

The Android part makes me sad, not because it's Android but because it's not MozillaOS (GeckoOS?). Google is basically doing now with Android what Microsoft did with Windows in the 90s -- providing manufacturers with something they can use pretty much off the shelf rather than rolling their own. So just like Dell, Lenovo, Sony, et. al never bothered to innovate or create great new PC OS, no one who doesn't already have a mobile OS (Apple, RIM, HP via Palm, Microsoft) is going to bother making one any more. Even the so-called Facebook phone looks like it's going to be built on top of Android.

That means, like Dell, Lenovo, Sony, et. al the innovation will turn to hardware, and differentiation will be left to software skins, bloatware, and stickers on the box. Impressive, perhaps, in the Alienware sort of way. But imagine if Mozilla was starting in the browser space now, would they just use Chromium instead of their own Gecko as the foundation for Firefox? Would Facebook have built their social network on the Twitter API?

For a while mobile OS were explosively innovative. We went from Newton to PalmOS to Windows Mobile to BlackBerry to Symbian to iPhone/iOS to Android to webOS and all sorts of experimental Linux-based OS that may or may not see the light of day. It was so much more exciting than the Windows/Mac/Linux pace of PC OS.

Sure it's hard making an OS, even with BSD Unix or Linux at its core. Sure going Android would certainly save Mozilla or Facebook or Verizon (yeah, went there), a lot of time and money, but part of me hoped we were just at some mid-point in the mobile revolution, that we'd still have the chance to be blown away by an iOS or Android or webOS again. That we wouldn't have to wait for the next big transition -- to neuralOS or whatever it will be -- before we get that feeling of everything being new again.

So great concept, great tech, spectacular vision, but that even in a video rendering this wasn't running an amazing MozillaOS as thought-provoking in software as the device looks in hardware, depresses me. (I still want those pico projectors and remotes.)

Video after the break

[Android Central]

Lots of movement on the Apple jobs (as in employment, not Steve) front lately, so here's a look at the recent loss of a music exec to Thumbplay, the gain of a security chief from Mozilla (and before that Microsoft), and they're hiring a Mobile Advertising team and an iBooks Store lead for Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Thumbplay, a company formerly noteworthy (or not) for ringtones is getting into mobile music says MediaMemo, hiring Pablo Calamera. MacRumors tells us Calamera was most recently Director of Apple's Engineering division, overseeing MobileMe. (Yeah, the troubled-launch jokes write themselves, right?)

Apple gains a security chief from Mozilla in Window Snyder according to PCWorld. Prior to that she started the Blue Hat program at Microsoft which helped them engage with security researchers. Please let that be her roll at Apple. Anything that creates faster security responses, actually.

Mobile Advertising, meanwhile, is being staffed up beyond even the Quatro Wireless purchase says Silicon Alley Insider. An iPhone advertising SDK manager is being sought and a team is being built.

Also being sought after is a manager for the iBooks Store says MacRumors, specifically one for Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Does that mean those countries will be getting iBooks as well at some point? We certainly hope so!

Any other insightful Apple job postings out there? Let us know!

This weekend GigaOm brought word that Mozilla was working on an iPhone app. Of course, thoughts turn immediately towards their most famous product -- Firefox. However, Apple doesn't allow 3rd party code interpreters and that means no Gecko HTML renderer and no TraceMonkey Javascript engine. And again, I don't think there's any need for Mozilla to make a WebView wrapper...

So what else is there? Browser link sync? The iPhone will sync Safari links, or Internet explorer on Windows, but syncing links for Firefox users is thus far unsupported, and no doubt many would love to have that functionality:

Later, I sat around gabbing with Lilly and Jay Sullivan, Mozilla’s VP of Mobile, talking about Weave and the Awesome Bar, which is a way to get access to all your browsing history and bookmarks by just typing them in the URL bar on your browser. And while we were talking about Weave, I asked them if it was going to be part of this new, mysterious iPhone app. Lilly and Sullivan smiled and remained silent. Interestingly, they didn’t correct me.

Malik notes that Weave might be too competitive with MobileMe for Apple's tastes, but that of course will depend on the exact implementation offered on the iPhone, and how flexible Apple is feeling (more so than ever, it seems of late). And if ever a Weave there was, bringing it to the iPhone certainly makes sense.

It seems that Mozilla has finally acknowledged the need for a mobile browser on the mozilla codebase that isn't wreteched. PC Advisor reports that the mozilla foundation will be putting resources towards a mobile browser. And they didn't act until now on the mobile browsing kit on the iPhone, 3 months after WebKit shines on the iPhone. To add insult to injury, Nokia has been using Apple's WebKit, the browsing engine that powers Safari on the iPhone, instead of anything based off of Mozilla's code, though Nokia also has a mozilla-basbed browser on their N800 tablet.

For those of you that are aware of Minimo, the project to bring mozilla to mobile devices, erm, make that Windows Mobile devices, the project is essentially dead. Minimo, doomed with only one developer who was not willing to expend extra time on the project, will never see an update again. A mobile browser project will now instead start from scratch.

You know, Opera has really been on top of the browser space. They put opera pretty much everywhere they could, and really got it out there. Their J2ME browser, Opera Mini, is a breakthrough bit of software for featurephones. I'm not generally liable to say anything pleasant about Internet Explorer, and by extension Pocket IE, but Pocket IE was a sight better than Minimo. It makes sad that Mozilla didn't get until now that the mobile browsing world isn't really a segment of the market where you want to be in last place.