Whether or not the Open fits your needs, one thing is clear: Mozilla needs more capable hardware to demonstrate Firefox OS’ potential. The Open is good for someone whose alternative would be a basic flip phone, but the camera quality, connectivity, display and performance don’t do full justice to the software.
A promising start, but clearly better hardware is needed. I’m really hoping Firefox OS gets a fair shot.
But the whole point of this phone is will it be enough?
With the new Install to Homescreen coming to Chrome 31 for Android, it’s apparent that Google will have the same platform and have better handsets at the same price. I fear FirefoxOS will be crushed.
https://developers.google.com/chrome/mobile/docs/installtohomescreen
Edited 2013-10-03 23:48 UTC
What is sad is here in the USA the Android phones they give away with the low end prepaid plans like Straight talk are frankly better and those are phones from 2011/2012. This has a lousy 256Mb of RAM while the LG Optimus Q and Samsung precedent both have 512Mb and while they only have an 800MHz CPU they are snappy and frankly RAM matters when it comes to apps.
It doesn’t matter how “free” the OS is if you put it on crap hardware, this is the problem Linux had with the OEMs who would take the older crappy hardware they had lying around and slap Linux on it. Moz better put their foot down and set basic standards that let the OS shine because in the end folks will NOT blame the OEMs, they’ll say FFOS sucks.
They aren’t really intended for most of the people in the US market.
As the article says:
‘it’s meant to deliver a smartphone experience to those who’d otherwise buy a basic cellphone — not to become the “next iOS or Android.”‘
This is part of the reason FirefoxOS exists, bring smartphones to people that don’t have a lot of money to spend on it.
So hardware will be less amazing if you pay less money, who would have expected that ?
The point is that vastly better hardware is available in the same price range. eg Huawei Y300 – dual core, 512MB RAM, 800×480 IPS screen etc sells for under $100.
Uhhh…thanks I so rarely get to post this WHOOSH! The point of my post was that the GIVE AWAY phone on even the lowest tier prepaid plans have BETTER hardware than this phone!
Again this sounds like an excuse to dump the low end junk they can’t sell on the regular market by saying “Oh its not FOR you, its for dumbphone users” while ignoring that the cheapest low end phones smoke this thing, no different than how Walmart took low end Via C3 single cores and some junk 40Gb HDDs and old DDR 1 sticks and said “This is a perfect Linux platform” when it reality Win98 would have ran on this hardware NOT a modern OS. BTW remember these phones I discribe are not only 2 years old but are GIVE AWAYS, totally unsubsidized, just buy a phone card and they will hand you this phone for nothing!
When even the lowest tier refurb junkers smoke your brand new phone in 2013? i’m sorry but its junk and no way in hell you can spin a junk phone into something else. Hell the ultra cheapo phones on Chinamart have more RAM than this!
Sorry, I did misread your comment.
Anyway ZTE Open is based on last years phone I guess:
http://www.gsmarena.com/zte_kis_v788-4586.php
So yeah, maybe it is behind the times.
It might have been new when the collaboration between ZTE and Mozilla started, who knows.
And Lennie replied that its not intented for most people in the US. What he meaned, my interpretation, is that you can’t compare US give-away + prepaid bundles and apply a its-only-$20 logic. In some countries you generally buy phone and prepaids (multiple carriers) separated and switch as needed. $1 prepaids can be used for months. Buy $1 get $2 discounts, generally free when calling within the same carrier, etc. Also there are huge differences in quality, availability, range between carriers. Some countries the maxium you can prepay is $5 cause there is no demand for more. Free wifi, dual-SIM, multiple phones/sims, etc.
Then what are the specs we compare with? Our requirements may rather different. Thiings like battery-life and build-quality (ie lifetime and robust) can become increasing important depending on conditions.
Edited 2013-10-04 20:30 UTC
In Australia prepaid calls cost as much as $1/minute!
Except basic cellphones last for an eternity on one charge compared to big screen smartphones.
Oh really? My old Samsung C90 could barely survive 2 days in idle mode. Siemens C45 – 3 days, while iPhone5 or Xperia Mini can work 3-4 days with music, internet, etc
Nah, you were just getting shitty models…
Not that it really matters on a website about operating systems and mobile devices, but I think you really meant “256 MB” when you said “256 Mb”.
MiB
with the additional benefit of full use of available hardware with native applications.
So what is the point again?
The latest Android versions depend on faster hardware, you can’t run the latest Android versions on cheap hardware. That is why you still see phones with Android 2.x on the market.
FirefoxOS doesn’t depend on beefy hardware. It supposedly runs decent on cheaper phones for markets and people that don’t want to spend as much money but still want a smartphone.
There are 6 billion people around the world with phones, only 1.1 billion of that are smartphones.
Plenty of phones that run Android 4.x are available for around $100 unlocked. eg Samsung Galaxy Mini 2 and Huawei Y300. Within 6-12 months all Android phones will run Android 4.x.
Edited 2013-10-04 09:05 UTC
Cheapest FirefoxOS phone is US $3 a month on contract. I don’t know if Android has reached that point yet.
Anyway it’s good that hardware improves, the more hardware improves and prices drop the better the webapps and webbrowsers run on Android phones and the more people can afford them.
Remember this is a Mozilla project, the web and webapps is the only thing they care about.
Webapps running on Android need 2 frameworks running on the phone at the same time: Android and webruntime. FirefoxOS only needs 1 to run webapps.
Many of the APIs Mozilla made for FirefoxOS have been proposed to the W3C and adopted:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI
Even if FirefoxOS goes away, Android browser, Chrome, mobile IE, Firefox for Android, whatever else runs on mobile devices can adopt these APIs and webdevelopers can use them.
Their goal is for an open (web) option to exist. And with still almost 4 billion people with only a feature phone they don’t have access to a proper webbrowser on their phone.
But Mozilla has done other things as well.
For example Mozilla and others at the W3c have been working on adding a (micro)payment system to the web.
You have to remember many of these feature phone users are using a pre-paid system, they don’t have a bankaccount (thus no creditcard). (8% of the people in the US don’t have a bankaccount either ! http://blogs-images.forbes.com/halahtouryalai/files/2012/09/underba… 28% of the people don’t do all their finances through banks).
So other models are needed. One model is to tie the payment to the network operator. So you paid for your voice and data plan in advance in a shop and then part of that money can be used for paying other things when buying webapps or other goods on the web.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/category/payments/
https://payswarm.com/
When evaluating Mozilla projects, there is always a bigger picture involved.
This is about how the web is for everyone. Many people currently do not have similar easy access to information as you do.
Edited 2013-10-04 09:48 UTC
Many Nokia “feature phones” have Webkit-based browser.
An other datapoint.
In the other comment I mentioned:
“Webapps running on Android need 2 frameworks running on the phone at the same time: Android and webruntime. FirefoxOS only needs 1 to run webapps.”
Did you know more memory in your smartphone means less battery life ? (and running 2 frameworks means using more memory obviously)
Let’s recap how a basic computer (thus also smartphone) draws power:
– CPU
– networking
– memory
– storage
– screen
When your phone is idle it goes to a sleep mode.
What is sleep mode ? I think it’s basically suspend to RAM, right ?
So the CPU is idle, storage is idle and screen is blanked. On the networking side, your phone is sending and/or receiving keep alives from the cell tower.
But memory is still going: refresh, refresh, refresh, refresh.
If it wouldn’t do that, the content would be lost.
So if your smartphone has less memory onboard, it will use less energy.
Maybe things have improved:
http://www.techspot.com/news/51750-smarter-design-cuts-existing-sra…
Edited 2013-10-04 10:19 UTC
HTML 5 apps take a lot more processing power to do the same thing as a native app.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-m8K4QOYms
Even the JS gurus are warning you not to be slack with modern JS engines.
S40 uses Java ME. Point is that more then the technology/language the complexity and richness of the apps are what makes the differences. If FirefoxOS likes to compete on low end, and I mean real low end, then it needs to run on $20 devices and offer a similar or better experience and ecosystem then S40.
According to reports Kit Kat, Android 4.4, goes even future down. Harder competition nears.
I agree, and I don’t think it will happen at the moment with pure web apps.
I have the browsers on my desktop can take 100s of mbs of ram, I know it isn’t the same as on a mobile … but I think it is telling about the reality of html 5 applications.
In summary:
On desktop: yes
On mobile: not yet
Even on the desktop, it is horrible sometimes.
Case in point, PDF.js makes my work i7 fully busy across all cores, while with Acrobat the system behaves as if it was idle!
FxOS has full hardware support like native apps, but in html5/js.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI
I would love to have FirefoxOS, but it’s a chicken-egg scenario: I want good hardware to go along with it, but device manufacturers won’t start supporting FirefoxOS until it shows it can sell.
I would migrate from Android to FirefoxOS in heartbeat if it came with quality hardware. I came from a Nokia N8 so my expectations are high. I was a laggard in the modern smartphone migration; only this year did I move to Android, and it was chosen over the other two options because it had Firefox.
For me, ZTE is a no-no. They have a history of not providing updates, and have admitted to a history of hardware backdoors in their phones. From following the Firefox forums, there are still bugs in ZTE’s implementation that were patched a long time ago in the mainline OS. Not good for a phone titled “Open.”
I ordered a Peak+ it’s only 149, so it’s at least some what faster hardware. I want to see what it’s like.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/25/geeksphone-peak-up-for-preorder-…
Please publish you review to OSAlert.
I doubt I would be a very good reviewer for this, I’ve never had smartphone. So I don’t have any experience to compare it with.
Makes it even more interesting. The biggest problem with current reviews of FirefoxOS is that they compare it to completely fleshed out platforms on modern phones.
For instance did you know that FirefoxOS is usually based on a 6 month old Firefox? This means that all the memory improvements that have been implemented in Firefox have yet to fall in FirefoxOS. So when a review says that it runs pretty good on a 256MB device imagine how much better it will be when it gets updated in 6 months. And even better imagine how it runs on a 512MB device.
I just got one of those phones 2 days ago. I bought it for my wife with a lycamobile contract as an emergency type phone. Mostly I’m pleased with it as a phone for doing basic things. But I do consider this phone to be sort of a featurephone/smartphone crossover.
My work phone is a galaxy s4, most everything related to phone and contact management, etc is comparable between the two. The biggest complaint I have (which is probably more like a bug) is that notification down swipe is way too sensitive to any slight horizontal deviation, and downswiping down the middle results in hitting the “home” button, cancelling the notification.
As a smartphone, the small screen and poor screen resolution really do hurt this phone. There just isn’t enough resolution to try to do much smart-phonish with it. I looked through the list of available applications and nothing really jumped out at me so far.
Edited 2013-10-04 01:43 UTC
Perhaps HP could purchase Mozilla and give them the hardware leverage they need?
lol. I see what you did there. That totally worked for webos, right?
The nice thing about FirefoxOS is that it is open-source. And real open-source at that so no waiting months for the source to be released.
That is why I think FirefoxOS has a good chance to succeed.
It’ll probably be embarrassing for Microsoft if even FirefoxOS manages to gain more market share than Windows Phone
That was too painful to be funny.
While it’s good that there’s a truly open choice, the fact remains that it’s an OS built around HTML. Me no comprendo. I thought webos taught us that this was a bad idea. Even they had to relent, and all the major apps used native code. It’s just a stupid idea, i’m sorry. An ugly hack. Keep HTML and JS to the browser, please.
The reason webos failed is because only Palm could use it and they released bad phones. On top of that most of the world couldn’t even buy the phones because they were only released to important countries.
The reason webos failed is because they did not work together. The webstandards they needed they had to make themselves. And because they were the only one using those standards nobody but webos developers would use them.
Clearly Palm did not understand the web. It is all about sharing and working together.
They have the Unreal engine running in JS BTW: http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/
At this point in time, JS that’s compiled down to byte-code, with type-hints, is the same as Java / Android. Is android not “native” enough either?
What you’re complaining about is UI. If it looks like a browser, smells like a browser, then it’s just not native enough, right?
You are aware that just about anything native can be compiled into JS? — Including an MP4 decoder that can play HD video.
Here’s MESS, all 300 machines worth of emulation, running in HTML5: http://jsmess.textfiles.com/
Firefox OS has the interesting benefit of an HTML5 interface, but also the ability to run “native” code (with some conversion).
Hurrah for porting stuff to one of the most awful programming languages ever.
It’s not porting, it’s compiling. “Porting” would imply that you were re-implementing the same reference design in JavaScript rather than cross-compiling existing source in another language.
they are used interchangeably.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/03/27/mozilla-is-unlocking-the-po…
And its not an easy port if you need to consider performance too.
Edited 2013-10-04 21:17 UTC
It’s a port, but it’s not a port in the sense that they re-wrote Unreal from scratch. They compiled their code down to Javascript using LLVM modules, so they wouldn’t have to deal with JS directly. ASM.js is an optimization in the browser runtime to help address a lot of performance issues, though it’s still young and there are a lot of problems left to solve (not the least of which is the relative bloat of compiling into a machine-created JS file instead of a size-optimized binary file). Whether it works out or not is just as nebulous as any other similar technology trying to run “native apps” in the browser.
JavaScript is actually pretty cool once you properly “Get It”.
I love writing JS these days because I have a lot of freedom to do stuff how I want, because the language affords me that flexibility.
Meh, I still think it’s an awkward language although it does admittedly have a rather neat object model.
Edited 2013-10-05 07:17 UTC
It very impressive that the Unreal Engine has been implemented in JavaScript and can do all these cool things in the language but …
Lets be honest, quite a lot of developers don’t understand JavaScript and usually write it another like another language, which causes quite a lot of WTF code, poor performance and generally everyone abuses jQuery.
The number of developers that are going to use the techniques that you described are going to be in minority.
Edited 2013-10-04 19:04 UTC
I believe Unreal wasn’t rewritten in Javascript in this case. It was compiled down to Javascript using LLVM and such. The entire point behind ASM.js and such was to try to let programmers port their non-JS applications into JS without nearly as much of the performance overhead you’d expect from such a process.
Of course that’s an oversimplification, since you’ll still have to worry about certain performance quirks or support limitations with the browser, but that’s not much different from porting your game/app to any other platform.
Well that is kinda my point. This isn’t how a web app is normally developed.
Agreed, but that’s probably due to change if tech like this makes it easier to do so. It could become more normal really quickly, if there’s a benefit to targeting “HTML5” as a platform. If Unreal can manage, I’m sure others can too.
Most in the JS community want to write JS not some other language. So I dunno.
Are you aware that what was ported was Unreal Engine 3, developed in 2006?!
Great! The browser in 2013 is able to display games developed with 2006’s technology, given the right amount of CPU and GPU power available.
Now lets go back to my native games with 2013’s technology.
I’d like to know why “2006” technology looks better than the best games on android.
oh wait, a troll. maybe that engine has been updated over the year, damn!
you’d guess the 3 totally inaccurate posts from the same user would’ve told me!
Dream on…
Keep an eye on Geeksphone Peak+, Sony’s upcoming phone which they will launch in 2014, and Foxconn’s tablet which will have quad core processor. There are many exciting announcements coming from different companies in near future