Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Feb 24, 2014, 5:09 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #28

keerthiko wrote: post #7

This is really cool, but I doubt it'll do much to the market. If the Firefox OS runs a browser brilliantly on this device, it might be a disruptor in the more developed world actually. But I find it unlikely that a low-cost smartphone with the level of power one can expect could do that (even my Nexus5 still chokes on loading some pages, chews battery running the browser, etc), so > "You're talking about a clumsy sma…

> Keep in mind that the "rest of the world" on average still runs on 2G with spotty 3G coverage That may be true, but it is changing rapidly. Ericsson, ZTE and Huawei are all betting large on rapid 3G deployment throughout sub-Saharan Africa, for example. Even countries like Ethiopia is seeing the start of 4G deployments.

Post by oceanstone » Mon, Feb 24, 2014, 5:16 PM UTC

fidotron wrote: post #23

oceanstone wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely. I just hope they bring it to flagship phones as well. I could see a lot of developers and open source advocates jumping on it. Especially if it had granular permission controls, which I believe Google had to bail on for backwards compatibility reasons [1]. [1] http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/13/google-removes-apps-ops-p...

The problem with flagship phones is the screens, which are high res enough that GPU acceleration of the user interface is mandatory for decent performance. Doing good enough GPU side rendering of web content is an unsolved problem, and if your devs are having to worry about it (as many mobile web devs already do) you've lost the point of using the web stack in the first place.

Post by pekk » Mon, Feb 24, 2014, 5:42 PM UTC

CmonDev wrote: post #20

rubiquity wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by tracker1 » Mon, Feb 24, 2014, 5:54 PM UTC

davb wrote: post #10

oceanstone wrote: post #4

Firefox OS runs very smoothly, when being simulated on the computer. On the $70 ZTE phone, it's less than stellar, mainly because the phone has issues registering touches. Also, there are some software bugs, like momentum being saved when it should have decayed, after you lift your finger 5s later in certain scrollable views. If the newer phones have better touch screens, and the OS consistently gets improved, especi…

Yes! I found exactly the same with my ZTE Firefox OS phone. The touch handling was extremely poor. I had hoped it would be resolved in an OS update. That said, I believe that even a slow Firefox OS phone that at least handles touch interaction elegantly and responsively has a good chance of succeeding in displacing feature phones in developing markets.

Post by netcan » Mon, Feb 24, 2014, 6:05 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #36

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 Raspbery Pi had a different experience. In the end, what killed the OLPC was politics, not product execution. And the initiative was widely sucessfull, just in a way that was different from the stated roadmap. Mozila is in a similar situation here. If somebody else make a device that replace their phones, they'll probably see it as sucess.