Anyone using firefox phone as your main phone? Do you like it?
Which phone would you recommend to get (assuming price is not an issue)?
Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get?
1–10 of 48 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get?
#2There are no high-powered phones yet. You may quickly get frustrated trying to use the existing devices as your main phone.
I have the geeksphone version with the resistive touch screen, and it isn't a fun experience (yet). I would suggest waiting a while.
Re: Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get?
#3I have the ZTE phone to play around with - I got it this past fall just for kicks. It's a great phone for the price, but that's also a very low price point.
FirefoxOS is 'ready' for prime time use if and only if you have relatively low requirements of your phone. It can do most basic tasks by virtue of the fact that it uses mobile websites as if they were native apps, but the experience is not yet comparable to Android.
I think it will get there soon, but right now I would only get one if you are very comfortable being an incredibly early adopter, and understand what kind of adjustment that requires on your part.
Re: Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get?
#4I have the ZTE phone to play around with - I got it this past fall just for kicks. It's a great phone for the price, but that's also a very low price point. FirefoxOS is 'ready' for prime time use if and only if you have relatively low requirements of your phone. It can do most basic tasks by virtue of the fact that it uses mobile websites as if they were native apps, but the experience is not yet comparable to Andro…
Have you upgraded it past the initial build? If so, how far have you gotten?
Re: Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get?
#5I have a Geeksphone Keon as my main/only phone. It's not the fastest phone, but fine for my fairly light use, but I think it does have more RAM than the first-gen retail FxOS phones (e.g. ZTE Open). I don't think I'd get one of those to use as my main device.
Geeksphone provides nightly builds, and I upgraded to FxOS 1.3 about a month ago. It's been stable for and a nice upgrade from 1.1.
I'm watching/waiting for 2nd gen devices before I'll upgrade. I think these will launch with at least FxOS 1.3. Some that I noted from MWC are the ZTE Open C and Alcatel One Touch Fire S. (These are the smaller-sized phones I'm more interested in, but there are others.) I don't think these devices have been released yet.
Mozilla's reference device, the Firefox OS Flame, is supposed to be coming out soon too.
[edit: added note on nightly builds.]
Re: Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get?
#6I've been using ZTE Open as my main phone for almost 2 months now. The cost isn't very high, but it does typical phone stuff. I've upgraded my FirefoxOS to 1.1 from the original 1.0. I also tried using 1.2 but there was a problem with the virtual keyboard where the keys doesn't adjust to lowercase so I reverted. ZTE Open doesn't have a really good hardware, but you get what you've paid for. It's really good for browsing the web, but doesn't do good with pages that have really heavy JavaScript.
Apps are pretty much limited, but it's a pretty new platform so we'll just have to wait (or code it ourselves). I don't usually erase SMS and I think it causes a bit of a lag when having tons of messages in your inbox. There will be a slight delay when creating messages if that is the case.
Calls are pretty decent, sometimes though, there's no sound in a call and have to stop the call and redial. I'm not sure if it's because of network problems or because of the phone.
There's this feature about sound issue in FFOS, where it "cares" when you've been listening in full volume and using earphones and automatically turns the volume down. I don't like it pretty much, but it's neat.
Also, there's still no copy-paste in FFOS 1.1.
All in all, I'm still using my ZTE Open, it's does the basic stuff but it might not suit you if you're used to IPhone and Android phones. I haven't tried other FFOS devices but if I were you, you can hold it for a while and wait for new devices to be released.
Re: Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get?
#7Don'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 unlockable with some exploits. Better than ZTE Open IMHO.
* LG Fireweb - better specs than the ZTE Open and Alcated OT Fire but its as locked as fort knox regarding the bootloader. You will not be able to flash your own device. If that is not a problem then its a great device.
* Geeksphone Peak - the second highest spec. Larger resolution than most retail devices and CPU but I think the battery drains too fast, I'd rather use Revolution.
* Geeksphone Keon - The standard developer phone for Firefox OS. Wonderful tiny device, the screen sux but the specs are better than the ZTE, Alcatel and LG.
My recommendation is to wait for the flame:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Developer_pho...
I have all the phones above. My daily driver is the Geeksphone Revolution and I've used the Fireweb and Alcatel daily before that. The Peak would drain too fast.
Disclaimer: I am a Mozilla Rep and member of the Brazilian Firefox OS Launch Team. If you're interested in developing apps for Firefox OS I've authored a free and open book about it available at:
http://leanpub.com/quickguidefirefoxosdevelopment/
I will hang around this topic if anyone has questions.
;-)
Re: Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get?
#8I have Geeksphone's Keon which is fine if your needs are not too ambitious. I'm very happy with it but it has obvious limitations so not everyone would be. App selection is not great (but happens to be fine for me) and UI can be a bit unresponsive (you need to wait for transitions to play out). Some of this problems would probably disappear with a more expensive phone, but others wouldn't (e.g. the dialer app would still be a bit crap). Cheap phone also has a benefit of anchoring your expectations appropriately.
Still, I do like my phone a lot.
Geeksphone now sells Revolution which is not that expensive, reasonably featureful and can run both Android and FirefoxOS. I have no experience with it, but if I had to buy a FirefoxOS phone today, it would probably be this one.
Re: Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get?
#9i like the geekphones
but the flame is far better
Re: Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get?
#10I'm using ZTE Open as my only phone for around 5 months now. It works for me. I have upgraded a few times, though you have to download a lot of git repos to compile the latest builds. Compiling the build takes a lot of time too. I'm running on version 1.3.
It's a good phone, enough for my needs. Sometimes background apps crash when you are using something else. This is an issue if you are listening to music while reading HN... If you use a single app at one time it works great. The phone cannot handle pages with a lot of data or JS.
ZTE Open is a good phone if your needs are low. Otherwise check out the other phones out there...