Damnit Mozilla, I want a web based mobile platform to succeed so badly and you're the company for it, but you keep killing your own fire with these repeated false starts. A 600 word blog post to announce the availability of a holding page? My credit card is burning a hole in my pocket! The approximate specs for the lowest end device were available on the B2G wiki for months.
Looking forward to holding this in my hand. For a few cents per unit, they might have made it even more compelling by adding dual SIM slots, certainly Chinese vendors seem to be able to manage this on <$100 Android handsets.
Not that I think it's a good practice, but the fact is a lot of companies announce products with great fanfar before they're actually available. Right now there's a press conference where they're talking about the phones. There's a Twiter tag:
The parts that matter are quite well run but the marketing side of things could apparently use some polish. For what it's worth this is simply a dev phone announcement and not meant to be a consumer device announcement.
I am quite excited for this not because FxOS will take over android/iOS but because it will give people a trusted organization behind their private data. This has less impact on the North American market but more in other countries that tend to value privacy.
I'm stoked that they partnered with geeksphone. I adored my geeksphone one. The pricing is what will be important here, as the low end android handsets are still lacking in the low-end market, in terms of performance anyway[0].
If they beat Androids performance, and development is easy, then it has a shot in my opinion. I mean, your basic apps are there already (such as http://x.Facebook.com), and if it's simple enough to port my mobile web apps over, I know I'll take the plunge.
Is that an officially endorsed dev platform by Mozilla? It sure seems to imply it, but I can't see anything on the website that directly says so. I have no doubt it'll run the builds, but when you're buying a pre-launch dev platform it makes a big difference if it's the one the core devs are going to be using and be an official platform target. I'm not suggesting it isn't, but its not on the site.
I loaded up Firefox OS on a Nexus S a few months back and the performance was really really poor compared to Android 4 running on the same hardware.
Their low end device looks similarly specced, so I'm a bit worried about how it will come off. Haven't gone through loading up the latest builds so perhaps performance has improved a lot.
Before Android 4.* (especially 4.1 and Butter) I think there was room for another competitor in the market, but I'm having a hard time believing FirefoxOS is going to be able to make significant inroads.
Android has finally grown up and contract-free low end phones are now available for $60. I would expect the 2013 ultra low end handsets will be 4.* which is really going to be a game changer.
The performance of Firefox OS today on 800MHz hardware is many times better than it was on the Nexus S devices back in the day. This is partly due to hardware but mostly due to the OS maturing.
In short, today's build of Firefox OS will run very fast on these developer specifications.
Good to hear, maybe time to load it up again to see where it has gone. I was really jazzed about it (bought a Nexus S just for the occasion) but seeing just how bad it was really broke my heart.
Developer preview probably means very small production run, which in turn means high unit price. Final, mass produced devices of course should be significantly cheaper.
"A few months back" is like 1/3rd the lifetime of the project. Also you're comparing a development pre-1.0 release with a 4.x release of another project. On most phones in the target price range, the latter isn't even going to run.
Agree on a few months back perhaps being ancient history.
Disagree that it is unfair to compare FirefoxOS and Android, consumers don't care who started when, they care about the product now. (and let's not forget FirefoxOS is bootstrapped off of Android so they are hardly starting from scratch)
They care about what is on their phone when it is released. I'm pretty sure that's not going to be a version "of a few months back" from now!
Conversely, all the really cheap Android phones on sale here run either 2.2, 2.3, or if you're very lucky, 4.0. And I don't expect those to magically get 4.1.2/4.2 anytime soon.
I get the impression the HN crowd doesn't really know what a low end phone is, let alone they have seen or used one.
I live in Rwanda, so I very much know what the IDEOS and company are like. As a matter of fact I have both versions of the IDEOS in my drawer actually.
I'll check out Firefox OS on the latest builds for sure, but I'd be surprised if we weren't seeing the new IDEOS coming out this year with the latest 4.x Android. We'll see.
I hope Firefox OS does well, I'm just saying that their window of opportunity for addressing the low end market with something unique is very quickly closing.
Firefox OS is not bootstrapped off of Android. In fact, it is nothing to do with Android. Firefox OS is a Gecko engine (the one behind Firefox) being run by a light-weight Linux kernel. There is no Android in there.
Err, well, no. You're both right. The lowest levels of B2G are the kernel from Android, RIL (telephony stack from Android), and other little bits like that (e.g. gralloc, which is what allows the fast texture sharing). There's a lot of Android in B2G, but it's well out of the view of users.
I'm going to buy a device just to support their initiative. For some reason I think it might become a raspberry pi of phone segment. Everything is open source so it's possible to tweak it as much as you heart desires.
Considering specs of the lower gen phone it should cost about $100.
A $100-to-consumers, thoroughly hackable phone would be a bonanza for geeky hobbyists, feature phone users and Chinese companies selling to the developing world. Let's see if they can get prices down to where people will not think too much about how they'd rather have Android.
I know Javier, the 20-yo entrepreneur behind Geeksphone - he's a brilliant mind, simply outstanding. I also know the CEO, really nice guy.
They knew it was gonna be a risky move, but I think they just nailed it. Congratulations Javier and the Geeksphone staff!
I think the important point is that consumers don't care about Firefox OS today, and likely won't in the future, even if it ever becomes widely available.
Right now, Firefox OS is extremely far back in line. It's behind Android, iOS, various mobile versions of Windows, BlackBerry OS, Symbian, MeeGo, and several others.
If it offered something special, then there's the remote possibility that it could succeed. But it really doesn't. It's quite unremarkable, and the emphasis on using HTML5 and JavaScript for app development will likely repulse many good developers who'd prefer to use a language like C, C++, Java or Objective-C.
It just keeps looking more and more like a dead end, even as they make progress.
the emphasis on using HTML5 and JavaScript for app development will likely repulse many good developers who'd prefer to use a language like C, C++, Java or Objective-C.
But it will attract developers who use HTML5 and Javascript, of which there are a great number.
FirefoxOS is clearly aiming itself at low-end devices in emerging markets. None of the other players have done a great job here, so yes, there is a market. We're just not in it.
A brand new thing is not behind things which have been effectively abandoned by their makers, such as Symbian. Even compared with platforms like Blackberry, there is much greater opportunity to build momentum as a new exciting thing (Blackberry isn't going anywhere). Which isn't to say this momentum will be used well.
Like it or not, the core of the idea is using web technologies. And there are good developers who like this. After all, you can use the same mix of skills to make the website as the mobile app.
If you want to write apps in Java or Objective-C, there are already platforms for that. Firefox OS will not get extra traction by being an inferior version of those platforms.
The OS is meant to be on phones targeted at consumers outside the typical smartphone market. It's supposed to be a high quality low-end alternative to iOS/Android, unless I'm forgetting something.
It's too late in this generation for another serious competitor to emerge in mobile. Microsoft might be able to muscle its way into double digits but everybody else is just too late to the game now.
Better to focus on what comes after phones & tablets, whatever that is.
There is still a lot of dissatisfaction with mobile, and plenty of room for improvement. The leaders want you to marry their platform at the expense of services offered by competitors. A newcomer might make inroads just by making it easy to use various competing services out of the box.
Google Sync was EOL'd 2 days before I bought my Windows 8 phone, leaving me with no way to sync my Google calendar on it. I don't want to be in anybody's walled garden exclusively, I want more interoperability and platform independence. Even Google has plenty of room for improvement.
You act like everybody wants to be the next Apple. I and many others will be happy with a smart phone that runs free software. There's room in this space for "The Red Hat of Phones" to come make some money and foster a loyal, if small, community. I don't know who it will be yet, but I don't think anybody expects Mozilla or Canonical to produce the next iphone.
Did they not say exactly that about Linux in the 90s?
Why do you need a third app ecosystem when a significantly more open phone should be able to run most code written for Linux or the web? Again, nobody is claiming they'll be the next iphone.
If you are Mozilla, then likely it's not better to focus on what comes after. Because you have no idea what that is, and it might not even provide an opening for promoting the open web, to which "app stores" based on proprietary technologies are antithetical.
I still use a Nexus One class (HTC Desire) which seems to have specs that are on par. I want Firefox OS but why would I buy another device with the same functionality?
There's a phrase that has been going around the usual meme-heavy sites for some time that I think would be useful here: "Shut up and take my money." Strutting around while making announcements of something people already know about, only to have those announcements lead to a holding page rather than a buying opportunity, only irritates people. Give them something they can buy, and they will.
Looking forward to holding this in my hand. For a few cents per unit, they might have made it even more compelling by adding dual SIM slots, certainly Chinese vendors seem to be able to manage this on <$100 Android handsets.