Live data from Hacker News

Firefox OS phones now available from Geeksphone

shop.geeksphone.com

11–20 of 92 posts

Re: Firefox OS phones now available from Geeksphone

#11
Hmm, since the website is pretty much hosed, I can't see what it says, but...

Even if it ships worldwide, as somebody mentioned, how can one tell whether it actually works with ?

There's no doubt a lot of coarse-grained commonality between different carriers in different countries, but there also seem to be many differences when you get down to the details, and a lot of incentive to add gratuitous minor incompatibilities for the purpose of locking in your customers... I'd be pretty nervous about importing a random phone.

Re: Firefox OS phones now available from Geeksphone

#12

CAUTION: After I had entered my payment details for my credit card (in Safari) the site forwarded to a white page and nothing happened. I checked the console, and realized that a javascript error caused it to not work properly in Safari. I could finish the process by manually doing a document.forms[1].submit() in the console. That placed my order, and forwarded me back to their homepage. HOWEVER: On the homepage, I g…

Same for me (see my other comment). I contacted them too.

Re: Firefox OS phones now available from Geeksphone

#13

Hmm, since the website is pretty much hosed, I can't see what it says, but... Even if it ships worldwide, as somebody mentioned, how can one tell whether it actually works with ? There's no doubt a lot of coarse-grained commonality between different carriers in different countries, but there also seem to be many differences when you get down to the details, and a lot of incentive to add gratuitous minor incompatibili…

I'm not familiar with the situation in Europe/USA, but I've never had trouble using a GSM phone with any GSM SIM card from any carrier in Asia. I'm not sure about the situation for CDMA or LTE.

Re: Firefox OS phones now available from Geeksphone

#17

Unfortunately, if I understand correctly these phones will not work with TMobile 3G in the US which only operates in the 1700-Mhz band. http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/phone-sim-card

You're half-right. T-Mobile's actually been adding service in the 1900MHz band, but it's limited at the moment. http://www.phonedog.com/2013/03/15/t-mobile-says-1900mhz-hsp...

Re: Firefox OS phones now available from Geeksphone

#20

Hmm, since the website is pretty much hosed, I can't see what it says, but... Even if it ships worldwide, as somebody mentioned, how can one tell whether it actually works with ? There's no doubt a lot of coarse-grained commonality between different carriers in different countries, but there also seem to be many differences when you get down to the details, and a lot of incentive to add gratuitous minor incompatibili…

I believe the main thing with GSM phones is what frequency it expects to transmit and receive GSM data on. This varies from country to country depending on what frequencies the various telcos could purchase at the time, but these phones support "GSM 850/900/1800/1900" and "UMTS 2100/1900/900" which I believe cover the majority of countries.
Post reply on HN