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Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get?

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Re: Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get?

#31

Post by blazespin »

blazespin wrote: post #13
soapdog wrote: post #7

Don't go with ZTE Open, its the worst phone. Best advise wait for the new models that are being released this year. If you don't want to wait you can get the following models: * Geeksphone Revolution - the most powerful phone but its running on a x86 architecture and the port is done by Geeksphone, even though they released three new updates already there are still bugs. * Alcatel One Touch Fire - great phone and is…

If you are a Mozilla rep, you probably want to delete this post or at least remove your overtly critical language. Hardware manufactures invest a lot of resources trying to build for your platform. They are your customer. Insulting them is not good business..

Lol, down voted. Weak, HN, very very weak. This guy could lose his position over that post and I was just trying to help him (maybe it's just a volunteer thing, though).

If he was at our company, he would have been fired in a heartbeat. Publicly insulting partners like that? Yikes..

Re: Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get?

#32

Post by gcb0 »

Most people here are giving suggestions without owning any Firefox phone.

I actually bought one when i was in Mexico. I tried to see them but even finding one to buy is difficult. See in mx and most other countries without heavy regulation, telefonica from Spain owns the market. And usually they have a shell company as competitor to avoid a mother bell like monopoly. In Mexico the shell company is movistar, the one that sells Firefox phones. Now, they spent millions advertising it. But any store i entered i was told they,never had it for sale. after 20 days and more than 50 stores i finally found one in the shady downtown area were you can buy most imported electronics without tax... The store was inside a parking lot, had 4 full time employees and had a total of 5 phones that they could sell (if that's not the point of sale of a shell company i don't know what it is) but one of the phone was a touch fire. So i bought it.

it was ffos almost stock, albeit and older version, there is zero new features from 1.1 to the bleeding edge 1.4... One nicety was offline gps app right out of the box. That beats any ios or Android phone.

Now for using the phone.. It's impossible because it is slow and crash all the time.

The only reason anyone would use one as their main phone is if said someone already compiled the emulator and wrote all the applications he thinks he will write when getting the phone. Until you do that, avoid getting the phone. I use mine just to see how slow a site with too much js would be

Re: Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get?

#33

Post by gcb0 »

gcb0 wrote: post #32

Most people here are giving suggestions without owning any Firefox phone. I actually bought one when i was in Mexico. I tried to see them but even finding one to buy is difficult. See in mx and most other countries without heavy regulation, telefonica from Spain owns the market. And usually they have a shell company as competitor to avoid a mother bell like monopoly. In Mexico the shell company is movistar, the one t…

Oh, and it requires hacks and binary blobs and impossible-to-compile-your-own kernel images... So there's that too.

Re: Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get?

#34

Post by minasss »

soapdog wrote: post #7

Don't go with ZTE Open, its the worst phone. Best advise wait for the new models that are being released this year. If you don't want to wait you can get the following models: * Geeksphone Revolution - the most powerful phone but its running on a x86 architecture and the port is done by Geeksphone, even though they released three new updates already there are still bugs. * Alcatel One Touch Fire - great phone and is…

thanks for the link (and phones review :) )

Re: Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get?

#35

Post by jgraham »

blazespin wrote: post #31
blazespin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a Mozilla rep, you probably want to delete this post or at least remove your overtly critical language. Hardware manufactures invest a lot of resources trying to build for your platform. They are your customer. Insulting them is not good business..

Lol, down voted. Weak, HN, very very weak. This guy could lose his position over that post and I was just trying to help him (maybe it's just a volunteer thing, though). If he was at our company, he would have been fired in a heartbeat. Publicly insulting partners like that? Yikes..

FWIW Mozilla reps generally aren't employees, but are part of the wider Mozilla community [1].

[1] https://reps.mozilla.org/

Re: Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get?

#36

Post by kbrosnan »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #23

It's a shame there isn't a "Firefox OS" app for Android, that basically acts as if it _was_ the OS for the phone. That way you could try it out without having to throw away your existing install/apps. There's no reason it couldn't be installed as the launcher, and take over running everything on the phone. I assume that that would be a fair amount of extra work though.

This really is not trivial. Firefox OS runs on the same fork of Linux as Android but does not have any of the Dalvik bits.

There is Firefox for Android, you can go to https://marketplace.firefox.com to test most apps. There are some apps that only specify manifests for Firefox OS.

The everything.me launcher may provide some of the look and feel of Firefox OS. http://blog.everything.me/2014/02/06/mozilla-and-everythingm...

Re: Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get?

#37

Post by lotsofmangos »

blazespin wrote: post #31
blazespin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a Mozilla rep, you probably want to delete this post or at least remove your overtly critical language. Hardware manufactures invest a lot of resources trying to build for your platform. They are your customer. Insulting them is not good business..

Lol, down voted. Weak, HN, very very weak. This guy could lose his position over that post and I was just trying to help him (maybe it's just a volunteer thing, though). If he was at our company, he would have been fired in a heartbeat. Publicly insulting partners like that? Yikes..

Your company sounds doomed.

Re: Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get?

#38

Post by fabrice_d »

darklajid wrote: post #28
fabrice_d wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just started handing them to core devs (and yes it's a really nice device). Once we'll have confidence that it's stable enough we will roll out to more people internally at Mozilla and then externally. Just a few weeks away!

Hey. That sounds amazing and I appreciate the answer. But .. 1) You state 'We just started handing them out', implying you are part of the process? Would you mind sharing your connection? Your profile doesn't say a lot. Are you with Mozilla? 2) So, my core question is still open: You hope for a release just a few weeks away? Where would I read about that, how would I keep tabs on this device's official launch (or ope…

1) I'm a mozilla employee working on Firefox OS. So, I have a pretty direct connection to what's happening there ;)

2) There will be an official announcement on Mozilla's blog for sure (https://blog.mozilla.org/).

Re: Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get?

#39

Post by fabrice_d »

kbrosnan wrote: post #36
AndrewDucker wrote: post #23

It's a shame there isn't a "Firefox OS" app for Android, that basically acts as if it _was_ the OS for the phone. That way you could try it out without having to throw away your existing install/apps. There's no reason it couldn't be installed as the launcher, and take over running everything on the phone. I assume that that would be a fair amount of extra work though.

This really is not trivial. Firefox OS runs on the same fork of Linux as Android but does not have any of the Dalvik bits. There is Firefox for Android, you can go to https://marketplace.firefox.com to test most apps. There are some apps that only specify manifests for Firefox OS. The everything.me launcher may provide some of the look and feel of Firefox OS. http://blog.everything.me/2014/02/06/mozilla-and-everythin…

Actually we could do it, it's basically "just" loading gaia's system app packaged for android web runtime. That would still need quite some work as we don't have yet feature parity on some api support. That sounds like a cool contributor project that could be mentored.

Re: Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get?

#40

Post by glogla »

soapdog wrote: post #7

Don't go with ZTE Open, its the worst phone. Best advise wait for the new models that are being released this year. If you don't want to wait you can get the following models: * Geeksphone Revolution - the most powerful phone but its running on a x86 architecture and the port is done by Geeksphone, even though they released three new updates already there are still bugs. * Alcatel One Touch Fire - great phone and is…

I read somewhere that Flame is supposed to be 170 EUR. Is that true?

Because if so, that's not a good thing. That's the same price as Motorola Moto G (which has 720p IPS display and quadcore) for phone with 800x400 display (probably TN) dualcore. Other specs seem to be pretty similar, but still, it makes Flame pretty expensive.

I know this is because of the economies of scale, but it still makes FxOS look bad. ZTE Open is terrible, but at least it's pretty cheap.

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