Firefox OS runs very smoothly, when being simulated on the computer.
On the $70 ZTE phone, it's less than stellar, mainly because the phone has issues registering touches. Also, there are some software bugs, like momentum being saved when it should have decayed, after you lift your finger 5s later in certain scrollable views.
If the newer phones have better touch screens, and the OS consistently gets improved, especially on UI front, I could really see this succeeding and taking a sizable market share.
Regardless, it'll change the game, and motivate Google & Apple to step up their support for HTML as a platform. It's already happening, with Android KitKat [1].
Yes! I found exactly the same with my ZTE Firefox OS phone. The touch handling was extremely poor. I had hoped it would be resolved in an OS update.
That said, I believe that even a slow Firefox OS phone that at least handles touch interaction elegantly and responsively has a good chance of succeeding in displacing feature phones in developing markets.
That may not be the case... When I was using my original G1, it wasn't the best interaction, and almost turned me off of Android. There were a few features that I really liked (contacts sync being the biggest)... but after a series of poor/middling experiences on tablets and phones... I managed to get a closeout Touchpad and really liked the UI for that...
From there, a friend mentioned that a lot of the UI in the latest devices with the untainted google experience had gone that direction in 4.x, I got a first gen Nexus 7... loved it, from there was going to get a Nexus, but held out for the Nexus 4. The first "smart" phone I actually liked... didn't wish it were a little more responsive, or a little faster.
The down side, even now, technical difficulties persist. For some reason the bluetooth doesn't sync to my car unless I turn it off, then back on... my last phone (ZTE) was worse than the samsung I had before that, or my G1.
Most people wouldn't stick with this kind of experience if there's something perceived to be better available. If the iPhone were available on a carrier other than AT&T early on, I would have switched over from my G1.
Something tells me that poor experiences on cheap Firefox OS devices will only lead to more Android and iOS adoption in those markets.
The more interesting part of OLPC's history, is that not only did the OLPC never quite get there on price, but it was pushing the 'wrong' platform. What the for-profit industry ultimately delivered to that end of the market, that has seemingly been a far bigger hit than $100 laptops, was something completely different and fundamentally more well-matched to users with no legacy computing experience/needs. [1]
It's entirely possible that a $25 smartphone will still be junk [2] until well after some other platform is created, polished and delivered to those users.
[1] Touch-based phones and tablets
[2] that is, flawed-enough that feature-phones and used phones are preferable to the experience provided by a 'new' $25 smartphone.
I agree. I'm just speculating about the best way of doing low price. Trying to design a project involving hardware that must be produced at high volume to reduce price, software that isn't currently being widely used and keeping it all at disruptively low price is a risky, hard thing to pull off. OLPC never quite made it.
A relatively low risk strategy might be see what's out there in volume, tweak, adopt and apply downward price pressure. Those phones have the advantage of already being in production with many units worth of experience. Starting at $70 with the aim of getting to $25 may not be a long way of getting there.
I don't really know anything about the business. Just thinking out loud.
But the price will get there soon with or without Mozilla. Android phones are already readily available at <$40. Give it another year and chances are they'll hit $25 anyway.
Definitely. I just hope they bring it to flagship phones as well. I could see a lot of developers and open source advocates jumping on it. Especially if it had granular permission controls, which I believe Google had to bail on for backwards compatibility reasons [1].
The problem with flagship phones is the screens, which are high res enough that GPU acceleration of the user interface is mandatory for decent performance. Doing good enough GPU side rendering of web content is an unsolved problem, and if your devs are having to worry about it (as many mobile web devs already do) you've lost the point of using the web stack in the first place.
In the end, what killed the OLPC was politics, not product execution. And the initiative was widely sucessfull, just in a way that was different from the stated roadmap.
Mozila is in a similar situation here. If somebody else make a device that replace their phones, they'll probably see it as sucess.
I think this is a very promising development (OLPC anyone?) but Android is cheerfully doing this organically:
"Looking at nice dual-core dual-SIM 3G Android for $30-40 wholesale. Quad-core for $100-125. And increasingly hard to tell apart from premium" (tweet from @BenedictEvans this morning).
Why did Ben Evans suddenly discover, about three years too late, that Android is open source and powering all kind of weird experiments? Is it to do with his new job?
Yes, and that's a entirely fair observation, but he's been full of these "amazing" stories about cheap android, and its use in developing nations for the last few months. That didn't just happen, and he presumably knew about it before, because that's his full-time job, so what changed?
I'm not trying to promote Benedict Evans as some kind of guru, merely quoting him as a source of information (rather than pulling something out of my ass). I usually find him reliable if not revelatory.
I think the point is that Android has become quite resource-intensive an performs very poorly on low-end devices. Firefox-OS is intended to be extremely light and to perform well on even the most anemic hardware.
Some Android apps that are part of the typical Google-logo Android user experience have become resource intensive. Dalvik, even with the addition of a JIT compiler, was initially targeted at a very low resource requirement, and, apart from the JIT compiler, which is highly tuned to working in small battery powered devices, there have been no fundamental changes to the Dalvik VM until the recent release of ART as a replacement runtime.
But how can a web browser be "extremely light" nowadays? It has to do all the complex layout rendering and JavaScript execution of pages that have ~50MB memory usage.
Except experience so far hasn't borne that out; FFOS has been pretty low performing on low performing hardware. The web was not made to be a lightweight platform, and any attempts to make it be one are going to be long struggles.
I'd love to see a Mozilla phone work in the market and I might buy one, but I'm skeptical about the $25 price point for a phone that's based on a web browser.
At the very least you need a battery that lets you actually use that browser for more than 15 minutes. That's about $10. Now there's $15 left for a touch display and a chipset and all the rest of it. That's very hard to imagine.
I hope it doesn't work out. I would hate to live in a HTML-JS only future they are trying to build. And please don't tell me about transpilation, because it's crap.
"non-optional language #1 - non-optional language #2 powered by your optional back-end (because we have no way of enforcing it)" - that's "Open Web" for you.
This is really cool, but I doubt it'll do much to the market.
If the Firefox OS runs a browser brilliantly on this device, it might be a disruptor in the more developed world actually. But I find it unlikely that a low-cost smartphone with the level of power one can expect could do that (even my Nexus5 still chokes on loading some pages, chews battery running the browser, etc), so
> "You're talking about a clumsy smartphone that's a little bit better than a feature phone - still primarily for voice and text."
will probably remain true.
Keep in mind that the "rest of the world" on average still runs on 2G with spotty 3G coverage, and uses little more of smartphone (or feature phone) functionality than Whatsapp (because that's all that can effectively function as intended on those networks).
The phone itself being cheaper does little to change their usage patterns: In India, before the iOS/Android smartphone era (~2006), even middle class schoolkids or the working class in oppressed areas who didn't have a solid roof over their head still had Sony Ericsson Walkman phones ($200 then) and Nokia N66s ($150-$300 over its lifetime). People like fancy phones in the developing world, and lowering the price will make the tiniest of dents in that space.
> Keep in mind that the "rest of the world" on average still runs on 2G with spotty 3G coverage
That may be true, but it is changing rapidly. Ericsson, ZTE and Huawei are all betting large on rapid 3G deployment throughout sub-Saharan Africa, for example.
Even countries like Ethiopia is seeing the start of 4G deployments.
I think more than a cheap phone they need a premium phone. A good looking, high end camera packing phone that shows the best of the platform. I agree with many who state here that Android is already doing well at the low end. The sub 25 USD buyer finds such phones too complicated.
I hope so, that way there will be less devs on these Apple/Google stores, script kiddies can go back toying with HTML5 on 25$ hansets for third world countries while serious developpers get more clients from Europe/Northen America with fast native apps on high end devices, A win-win ! Please move to HTML5 quickly,trust me you'll love it.
Only if they aren't making good money on Android/iOS and actually start to make good money on FirefoxOS, which hasn't happened yet and might never happen
They already had to port their apps or miss out on half the market. If say browser-based phones take 1/3 of the market, then an HTML/JS app will reach the whole, whereas iOS/Obj-C and Android/Java only reach 1/3 each.
On the $70 ZTE phone, it's less than stellar, mainly because the phone has issues registering touches. Also, there are some software bugs, like momentum being saved when it should have decayed, after you lift your finger 5s later in certain scrollable views.
If the newer phones have better touch screens, and the OS consistently gets improved, especially on UI front, I could really see this succeeding and taking a sizable market share.
Regardless, it'll change the game, and motivate Google & Apple to step up their support for HTML as a platform. It's already happening, with Android KitKat [1].
[1] http://java.dzone.com/articles/android-44-kitkat-browser-and