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Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets

#11

Post by Pxtl »

ck2 wrote: post #5

There is no way a phone that can run firefox os won't also be suitable for android and visa versa. And free OS is free OS ? How does either add to the cost of the phone? Am I missing something? Not that more competition is not a better thing, I mean I love my firefox browser and only grudgingly use chrome.

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.

Re: Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets

#14

Post by fauigerzigerk »

Pxtl wrote: post #11
ck2 wrote: post #5

There is no way a phone that can run firefox os won't also be suitable for android and visa versa. And free OS is free OS ? How does either add to the cost of the phone? Am I missing something? Not that more competition is not a better thing, I mean I love my firefox browser and only grudgingly use chrome.

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.

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.

Re: Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets

#15

Post by roc »

netcan wrote: post #2

The OLPC story kind of makes me think that announcing and planning a disruptive change when the disruption is mostly price based is a tricky strategy. I wonder if Firefox might find it easier to just pick up existing low end android models and see if they can get a better experience with Firefox OS.

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.

Re: Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets

#16

Post by mdwrigh2 »

rubiquity wrote: post #13
CmonDev wrote: post #12

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.

Yes, because an Objective-C or Java only future is so much brighter!

It's a good thing neither of those platforms support HTML and JS.

Re: Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets

#17

Post by fauigerzigerk »

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.

Re: Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets

#18

Post by mdwrigh2 »

Pxtl wrote: post #11
ck2 wrote: post #5

There is no way a phone that can run firefox os won't also be suitable for android and visa versa. And free OS is free OS ? How does either add to the cost of the phone? Am I missing something? Not that more competition is not a better thing, I mean I love my firefox browser and only grudgingly use chrome.

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.

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.

Re: Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets

#20

Post by CmonDev »

rubiquity wrote: post #13
CmonDev wrote: post #12

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.

Yes, because an Objective-C or Java only future is so much brighter!

That's not what I said. No single language future is better. Innovation thrives when you give people options.
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