Got to try a Firefox OS phone (or three) last week at a short hackathon in Telefonica Digital's offices in London.
The first device I tried (and apparently the one with the beefiest hardware) was an Alcatel One Touch Fire. My enthusiasm took a sharp turn downward from the moment I unlocked the device; accomplished by sliding the screen left to right, the animation was jerky, did not track my finger accurately, and skipped to the end when I let go of the screen halfway through the width of the screen.
One of the hosts was quick to point out that the lock screen interaction was actually custom programmed by Alcatel, and so is the rest of the user interface, at which point he pointed to try a different device running something closer to "stock Firefox OS."
I'm enthralled by the promise of helping the web win by creating a device category where the web is a first-class citizen, but I'm doubtful it will happen if manufacturers outsource their tasteless UI customizations to web dev interns.
Sunspider came out at roughly 1600ms, which places the mid-2013 Alcatel somewhere in the performance bracket of an iPhone 4 (mid-2010, flagship device). Despite the rough benchmarks, I ran some Famo.us demos and they were surprisingly usable, and I could easily get a physics-backed drag interaction to run smoothly inside the browser.
I'm waiting to try out a Firefox OS phone with cutting edge hardware.
The first device I tried (and apparently the one with the beefiest hardware) was an Alcatel One Touch Fire. My enthusiasm took a sharp turn downward from the moment I unlocked the device; accomplished by sliding the screen left to right, the animation was jerky, did not track my finger accurately, and skipped to the end when I let go of the screen halfway through the width of the screen.
One of the hosts was quick to point out that the lock screen interaction was actually custom programmed by Alcatel, and so is the rest of the user interface, at which point he pointed to try a different device running something closer to "stock Firefox OS."
I'm enthralled by the promise of helping the web win by creating a device category where the web is a first-class citizen, but I'm doubtful it will happen if manufacturers outsource their tasteless UI customizations to web dev interns.
Sunspider came out at roughly 1600ms, which places the mid-2013 Alcatel somewhere in the performance bracket of an iPhone 4 (mid-2010, flagship device). Despite the rough benchmarks, I ran some Famo.us demos and they were surprisingly usable, and I could easily get a physics-backed drag interaction to run smoothly inside the browser.
I'm waiting to try out a Firefox OS phone with cutting edge hardware.