Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets
1–10 of 52 posts
Re: Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets
#2The 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.
Re: Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets
#3The 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 low price is crucial - it's about emerging markets. Think Africa, Asia, South America.
Re: Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets
#4Firefox 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, especially on UI front, I could really see this succeeding and taking a sizable market share.
Regardless, it'll change the game, and motivate Google & Apple to step up their support for HTML as a platform. It's already happening, with Android KitKat [1].
[1] http://java.dzone.com/articles/android-44-kitkat-browser-and
Re: Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets
#5There 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.
Re: Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets
#6The 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 low price is crucial - it's about emerging markets. Think Africa, Asia, South America.
The same was true for the OLPC, so netcan's argument is still valid.
Re: Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets
#7This 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 smartphone that's a little bit better than a feature phone - still primarily for voice and text."
will probably remain true.
Keep in mind that the "rest of the world" on average still runs on 2G with spotty 3G coverage, and uses little more of smartphone (or feature phone) functionality than Whatsapp (because that's all that can effectively function as intended on those networks).
The phone itself being cheaper does little to change their usage patterns: In India, before the iOS/Android smartphone era (~2006), even middle class schoolkids or the working class in oppressed areas who didn't have a solid roof over their head still had Sony Ericsson Walkman phones ($200 then) and Nokia N66s ($150-$300 over its lifetime). People like fancy phones in the developing world, and lowering the price will make the tiniest of dents in that space.
Re: Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets
#8The 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 low price is crucial - it's about emerging markets. Think Africa, Asia, South America.
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...
Re: Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets
#9The 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 low price is crucial - it's about emerging markets. Think Africa, Asia, South America.
I agree. I'm just speculating about the best way of doing low price. Trying to design a project involving hardware that must be produced at high volume to reduce price, software that isn't currently being widely used and keeping it all at disruptively low price is a risky, hard thing to pull off. OLPC never quite made it.
A relatively low risk strategy might be see what's out there in volume, tweak, adopt and apply downward price pressure. Those phones have the advantage of already being in production with many units worth of experience. Starting at $70 with the aim of getting to $25 may not be a long way of getting there.
I don't really know anything about the business. Just thinking out loud.
Re: Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets
#10Firefox 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.