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Firefox OS: Disruptive By Aiming Low
judgecorp writes "As Apple launches a new slightly-improved iPhone 5, Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich says if you want a really disruptive phone you should look to Firefox OS. It's a low-cost low-end device — and that's the point. It uses standards so should be resistant to patent infringement suits, it will fit on featurephone-grade hardware, and it will run HTML5 apps without the restriction of native apps in an app store. In other words, it's aiming for the next 2 billion smartphone users, people who can't afford the iPhone/Android model." Reader rawkes has some (very warm) thoughts about Firefox OS, too, which helpfully includes both screenshots and a video demo.
This sounds a lot like my current WebOS phone.
And thought: "What a load of crap." then I read TFA and the other thing and I was like: "Oh wow, this is not a bad idea at all." and then I thought: "Could have done with this earlier, though."
And needs 8 GB of ram!!!!
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
The homepage is a grid of icons with 4 icon dock in the bottom,
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
And who are they?
If you get a contract ( like most people do ) you can get one for free ( ok, not truly free, but no up front outlay of cash ). If you want to own it out right, buy last years model. Or just buy a china android..
If you cant do either, you most likely cant afford the smart phone data charge either so the point is moot.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So will this OS also need to update every 6 weeks, killing all of the apps you download?
As compared to Firefox for Windows that is. If they can make Firefox run smoothly on a poorly spec'd device only a hardware-hacking Slashdot reader would love, why can't Mozilla make it run smoother on a multicore GHz-class desktop?
Does this mean the X + desktop environment layer really sucks and that baremetal Linux can run Firefox faster than Chrome on steroids?
How did we get on the subject of Internet Explorer?
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Agreed. Cell phones are cheap as fuck. It's the service that beats you down. I have never owned a smart phone, because while I'm fine paying a couple hundred bucks every two or three yeras for a phone, I'm *not* fine paying a couple hundred bucks a *month* for a plan.
If Firefox OS is anything like Firefox for Android then they may have a winner. Firefox for Android is good. If you haven't tried it yet you should. Fast, stable and efficient. Way better than the stock Android browser.
Perhaps in South America Mozilla should re-brand to, "Raposa de Fogo" Personally, I never jumped on the smartphone bandwagon. I've never owned an iPhone or a droid. I have one of those cheapy fake smartphones that are half-assed. I call people I text people - that's it. When I work I fire up Mint 13 on my laptop, and go to the shell, or whatever.Yet recently my friend who is a smartphone programmer asked me to test his app on IOS, so I'm buying an iPhone 5 as a favor to him. Maybe I should tell him to port it to Firefox Os. Then we can yell "Raposa de Fogo" together - toasting yerba matte while we brag about using "Raposa" before it was cool. ;-)
The model of the web as an OS has been passed around since the turn of the century. The dot com bubble tried it. Oracle has tried it, repeatedly. Microsoft tried it. Every attempt so far has failed, and it was by people with far more resources than the Firefox team. I could type out a long list of reasons why this is, but what's the point? History tells us that no matter how promising it looks, and how pretty it is, it's destined for the scrap heap.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Looks like someone has never been to the developing world.
Holy shit... couple hundred a month? Where is that?
When I want my phone to be 'disruptive', I usually just turn up the volume and then set my ringtone to some pop song...
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Where do you get this ridiculous $200/month price? My family all has smart phones (teens included) and we pay about $40/month each. (Thanks, MetroPCS) Oh, and that's for mix of 3G and 4G/LTE Android phones. MetroPCS isn't the best network, but covers (sub)urban California pretty well.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
no contract phones like Net10 and Tracfone. You just buy minutes and service days and each thing you use deducts a certain amount of minutes. No iPhone will do that yet that I know of.
Tracfone I have, I bought a $15 Motorola Tracfone 5 years ago and still use it, averages $7/month for me. I am thinking of switching to a different model, but no iPhones and Android phones are available for the Tracfone pre-paid service. They are more likely to use the Firefox OS phone because it is cheap.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Is it running on top of a typical POSIX environment on which I can run bash? That's all I want from a pocket computer.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The funny thing is that Chrome, which was originally Windows-only, runs better on Linux than Firefox
I think it has something to do with Chrome being essentially the only UI toolkit available on Chrome OS netbooks. Google had to get it right.
The last time I checked, Chrome required an Android 4.x device that comes with the Google Play Store, while Firefox could run on any Android 2.2/2.3 device with an ARMv7 CPU and enough RAM. Not all devices are officially upgradable to Android 4, and not all devices come with Google Play Store.
I think the point is that cheap android devices suck. This tries to be the cheap less sucky option.
From TFA:
This is nuts. They're not targeting feature-phones at all... I was expecting something really low-end, with a fast HTML5 interpreter, instead of mobile java. Instead, they're targeting the low-end of current 1st world smart phones.
Those specs are better than the Samsung Replenish, going for $80 on Boost Mobile or the Alcatel Venture, going for $30 on Virgin Mobile. Those are unsubsidized prices, too, meaning you can go out any buy as many of those as you want, without ever signing-up for service.
So think of it this way... Do you want some phone specificaly designed for poor people, which doesn't have any apps, or a generation-old Android phone, which is much cheaper because they recouped their R&D selling it in the USA/Europe for years, and because the specs are slightly lower? A device which can run most of the millions of regular Android applications out there...
It's pretty clear which way to go. Of course cell phone makers are nuts, and will try anything once, because the successes are so damn profitable.
I think the FirefoxOS guys just know they don't have a product, so they're saying it's for poor people, so they can pretend they don't have to compete with Android, because nobody believes they have a snowball's chance in hell of competing with Android, here or in the 3rd world.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Chrome works better than Firefox everywhere.
Except on devices that can't run Chrome but can run Firefox, as I mentioned in another comment.
Most people IN THE USA do that. Everywhere else in the world, they do not, and have to pay for their own damn hardware.
When you're just swapping pre-paid SIM cards to go from one provider to another, there's nobody to subsidize your phones for you.
We're not talking about the USA/Europe here. Head to Africa, and you'll find that cell service is cheap... With terrible exchange rates, and dirt-cheap labor, locally provided services are reasonably priced, while any imported items are very expensive. When people survive on an income of less than $100, you can buy a (locally produced) Coke for $0.12, but an imported iPhone is still $600+, you start to see the problem.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It uses standards so should be resistant to patent infringement suits,
You'll be surprised what's patentable lately. And whether something is a standard or not has little to do with it.
it will fit on featurephone-grade hardware,
Running and running well are two different things. I'm skeptical until handsets are actually in the wild.
and it will run HTML5 apps without the restriction of native apps in an app store.
This is how "apps" were done on the original iPhone. There were Apple's apps, and there were 3rd party AJAX applets that generally ran from within Safari. And people complained because the quality of the user experience was hobbled by them not being native apps. The restrictions have nothing to do with whether they're native apps or HTML5 doohickeys. You can make native apps and not have an app store at all. Just let people load them to their phone direct from web downloads anywhere on the web or uploaded from flash memory card or USB sticks, kinda like how actual PCs work (for now).
In other words, it's aiming for the next 2 billion smartphone users, people who can't afford the iPhone/Android model.
Considering the iPhone 4 can be had for free now plus the iPhone has been available on prepaid for years, you could buy an older does-not-support the latest iOS iPhone pretty cheap now unlocked on Craigslist and avoid even the required Data Plan stupidity. If you can't afford one now you probably have things you should be focusing your money on instead (like food).
Luddite with no data plan here... any kind of data plan that I would consider worth having runs $70+/month - $840/year, I don't really care if the phone is free, I don't want to sign up for a multi-thousand dollar future debt.
If they'd sell me an iPhone with voice only service and let me access WiFi only for my data, I'd be on-board, even at $600 up front, but between now and retirement, a data plan looks like it might add up to the equivalent of a nice cabin cruiser, or a condo on the beach - is checking Google while you're waiting for the check in a restaurant really that valuable to you?
The low-end devices they are targeting have 256MB RAM and 600-800 Mhz processors.
That was the high end about a year and a half ago. That means Mozilla has about that large of a time window to get this to market before the "feature" phone (whatever that means) has the same power of today's "smart" phone and can run today's Android. If I was a developing world consumer and could only afford a cheap phone, I would absolutely pick today's Android experience over some HTML-only mess.
No this isn't one of those asinine Apple did it first posts, but do try to remember back to the days of the original iPhone. The SDK wasn't available and people had to make do with Web based apps. There were screams for Apple to hurry up and release a native SDK.
I wish them luck, and I do think cheap web based phones are a underserved market. However I think Brendan Eich isn't doing Mozilla OS any favors by trying to compare it to the likes of iOS or Android. They may find themselves in the same grave as WebOS as people wonder when or if a native SDK will come out.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Family of 5, adds up to $200/month on my calculator - for a service that doesn't work when we travel on weekends? No thanks.
I think you're missing the low-end concept here.
you can get one for free
You can be forgiven for thinking that $30-60 dollars a month is no big deal. For some people it's completely untenable. They are actual, literate human beings with rights and stuff. They don't have 'plans.'
buy last years model
Last years model isn't all that cheap, especially if it's unlocked. An unlocked Nexus S from 2010 is $340+, for example.
Today you can get a new, unlocked low power Android phone from LG for about $100. A year from now a new phone with the same power will probably be $75. An unlocked smart phone for the price two month's 'plan' cost. You can get GSM for $0.10 and Skype minutes for $0.019. A full function unlocked smart phone for cheap. Real cheap.
That's what we're talking about. So cheap it's almost disposable. And no 'plan.'
Android does run on those low end phones. The runtime overhead doesn't help, however. There is a place for a really efficient smart phone OS and Firefox OS is aiming right for it.
smart phone data charge
Lack of data does not preclude smart phones. For some people the smart phone is the only web capable device they own. Those people will know exactly where to find several reliable wifi hotspots within a walk or short drive.
People who spend time with seasonal workers get all this. Please try to allow for your own ignorance; there are a lot of other people on this planet.
At first I was like "OMG", but then I was all "Hmmm...."
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Jesus, I pay less than $20 a month.
And that's 3G with 800MB "fast internet", and if I go over, unlimited slow internet.
I think I only went over once.
What's the point of putting the most bloated browser on the lowest end devices? Seems like a dumb idea to me.
My thought is that this type of project has a lot in common with OLPC, since a Smartphone is essentially a PC in a small footprint. Cheap, open source, nice interface, low-end hardware, for the 3rd world. Mix Firefox OS with mesh networking, and things just might get interesting...
Whatever happened to OLPC? They are still around but I hardly hear of them anymore...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
If I want a phone that's cheap then I want to use bad hardware. If I want to use bad hardware program efficiency becomes more not less important. Further to use HTML5 I need a rather expensive data connection, which means it is unlikely the phone is too cheap. OK so he say's he targeting 256m or Ram 700mhz processor.
Just to put this in perspective:
iPhone 1 420mhz 128m ram
iPhone 3G 412mhz 128m Ram
iPhone 3GS (being sold for another 2 weeks, runs iOS 5) 600 mhz 256m Ram
So he's targeting the bottom of the smart phone market where iOS (at least up to version 5) and Android 2/3 run fine.
And I pay $25 for 2.5 GB (and get throttled after that) and 300 minutes. I never went over the limit.
To be disruptive, a device has to attract developers and users. This one hasn't even got a hardware vendor. In any case, the constant screwups with Firefox and Thunderbird make me very skeptical that Mozilla can disrupt a church picnic, never mind find a place in an extremely competitive mobile device market.
I take it you haven't used Firefox lately? Man I really wish they'd spin these research projects off and keep the browser devs focused on the damned browser. Used to be every release it got better, sure it had bugs but you could see real progress being made, each release was better than the last...not anymore, now it gets prettier but NOT better and on anything low power it gets curbstomped by any of the Chromium variants.
As for TFA...where is the market? Third world maybe? Hell Walmart is selling $130 no contract Android phones now and the price is dropping all the time, i really wouldn't be surprised to see a $60 Android phone this time next year. So I really don't see what market they are gonna target with this thing, maybe if it would have come out 3 or 4 years ago but now all the ODMs and devs know Android and its really not hard to get the 2.x branch to run on any damned thing, look at all the sub $80 tablets out there. Hell the other day I saw a $100 tablet running 4.0, so how cheap can FF go and still have a market worth pursuing?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Agreed. Cell phones are cheap as fuck. It's the service that beats you down. I have never owned a smart phone, because while I'm fine paying a couple hundred bucks every two or three yeras for a phone, I'm *not* fine paying a couple hundred bucks a *month* for a plan.
I don't think the three of us on the family plan with iPhones pay that on AT&T. That comes with the super cool unlimited 3G that is suddenly limited at 4GB per month, but the day I hit is the day something is really wrong in the universe. But a couple hundred a month for the plan - did it come with a person?
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
Those of us who don't live in your California suburb and who have multiple devices on a wireless carrier's network. I pay $130 for a smartphone with unlimited data, text, and a lot of minutes plus an additional traditional flip phone on Verizon. You can probably tell I'm grandfathered under the old plan. Verizon is going to push me into a new contract one way or another either with them or a new carrier. I need a lot of reliability even in the middle of nowhere, and I need about 3GB data and a lot of texting. Verizon's new plans which I will be pushed into if I upgrade will cost me probably around $150. I can see some people easily running $200 if they use a tablet on their carrier's network. I believe it would cost me maybe $40 to add an iPad/Android tablet to my plan. That will be nearly $200 right there.
Look at the Walmart straight talk Android phone, its popular as hell here and after playing with one I can see why. The phone is $130 (A Galaxy something, you'd have to look it up but it surfs nice) and the service is $50 a month unlimited everything and no contract. You can even get it cheaper if you buy in 3 month or 6 month instead of monthly.
I figured at that price it would really suck but...it was nice actually. The phone was responsive, battery life was decent, it surfed and played music nicely, really couldn't find anything wrong with it other than no SIM support. If all you want is a smartphone with no contract crap you should check one out.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Obviously with Verizon and AT&T...
Browsing Verizon's website, a smartphone with a 10GB data plan is advertised as $140/mo, and that's BEFORE Verizon factors in their fees and taxes.
In fact I'd say MetroPCS is the worst of the worst... If you want to go for cheap, prepaid service, you could go T-Mobile, but Sprint (Boost, Virgin, etc) usually has the best deals with decent nationwide coverage.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Newsflash: you don't need a mobile data plan to enjoy a smart phone.
Most of them do WiFi too, if you really need data, and a large number of apps don't need data other than for downloading ads. I'm very happy with my smartphone and 2G-only voice plan.
Because they're the topic and focus of this story...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
... THIS TO SUCCEED!
As a developer of web-based apps, we're often asked for "an app" for our product. Yes, our app is web-based, and we do make a custom CSS for mobile that eases some of the pain, but being purely web-based has problems too, in that even with cellular you can't truly bank on 100% online 24x7, resulting in application errors, lost data, etc. There are "local install" options but it's very tough to get much done with only a few MB of local storage available without having to endlessly bombard the end user with requests for more space.
Simply put, there's just not a good way to build a standard, packageable js-only app and I really, REALLY want the Mozilla/Firefox team to come up with a compelling enough solution that Android/IOS has to follow suit for compatibility and let me FINALLY build an app usable by everyone.
Apple will fight this tooth and nail. I may have to do the same thing I did with IE years ago: simply refuse to support it. (sigh)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
That comes with the super cool unlimited 3G that is suddenly limited at 4GB per month
Really? I went from unlimited data on first gen iPhone and an iPhone 3GS to unlimited data on two iPhone 4S without any fuss from AT&T.
It's a 6 cylinder Chevy Nova, Ford Falcon, Plymouth Valiant. Get the job done. Little else really matters. Frills tend to backfire.
that I can use to overwrite the Firefox OS if I ever get a mobile device with FirefoxOS in it
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
OMG! End of the world!
I don't see much appeal in an OS that only runs a web browser. I understand there's a desire to move away from centrally controlled app stores, and the web as a platform has become more capable over the years, but to me from both a developer and user standpoint HTML5 and friends still provide a very sub-par experience compared to what "native" apps can offer.
That said, I wish Mozilla success, and hope they can convince major vendors (probably not Apple) to open up their phones a bit more.
Let the reader be warned that the two articles linked to from the summary are a gushing review by a Mozilla employee and an interview with the Mozilla CTO.
Even so, how many operating systems announced lately are saying that their API is basically HTML, CSS, or JavaScript? Google Chrome OS, Tizen, node.js, Blackberry 10 (sort of at least?), Windows 8 Metro, and now Firefox OS.
DISCLAIMER: I am a web programmer. (And right now, I'm happy to be one.)
Standard response to the myriad complaints about having to use JavaScript: JavaScript, as a language, is nice. Its history is tainted by incomplete browser implementations, namely Microsoft's. Also, its low level of entry flooded the web with really bad examples. If you really want to learn JavaScript, read JavaScript: The Definitive Guide or JavaScript: The Good Parts.
It sounds like they agree with Jason Fried, who cowrote the book Getting Real, which you can read free online. To wit, this chapter: Build Less.
Somebody with usable mod points in this discussion should mod this smart shopper up. Data plans are an INSANE luxury unless you're able to use it to make more money than you're paying every month for it. Same reason you're an idiot if you take out a loan to buy anything personal other than a house.
That is NOT how it works. Standards are not a defense against patent claims, especially on the web, where some of the basic technologies like video display codecs are patented up the wazoo.
The evil of patents is that even if you mind your own business and do everything right, some American Troll who paid money to Uncle Sam's Patent Emporium can attack you and 1) stop you doing business, 2) demand money for past "infringements".
Android phones can be had for 69 bucks with no contract and $40/month unlimited service at metropcs. These things will have to be REAL damn cheap to beat that.
Family of 5, adds up to $200/month on my calculator - for a service that doesn't work when we travel on weekends? No thanks.
Some carriers could probably market the lack of coverage as a benefit ;) "No service in Hawaii!"
you're asking people in the US to choose between things that cost money? what are you crazy? the answer is get BOTH. the debt will eventually just go away on it's own. I mean, seriously, there's an IPHONE 5!!!!11!!
My 0% loan for a new Prius disagrees... In seriousness, I think you should include cars as they.are a pre-req for most people to have or maintain a job.
After a quick look here's a $69 android phone from Wal-Mart. And while I wouldn't expect much from it, I have to mention this $49 tablet that also came up in the search for cheap androids. I mean for $49 you certainly won't be worried about damaging it. You could get one just for the bathroom.
This is just like the whining about the Raspberry Pi. It was pronounced an utter failure on Slashdot before it shipped, and they have now sold 200,000 units. Demand is still high enough that there are complaints about delivery times.
Did it take over the educational market for tiny computers? It's too soon to tell. It has to get into the hands of early adopting teachers first. Then it has to get wider acceptance in the educational domain, which can take time. Even if it doesn't have the impact they were hoping for in education, it can be a success in other areas. Success is success.
Consider Firefox OS. When it gets going it will be considerably less encumbered then Android. Look at what Google did to Acer when then tried to bring out a smart phone: http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/12/09/13/1916211/alibaba-says-google-threatened-acer-with-banishment-from-android. It will also be intrinsically much less vulnerable to the ridiculous patent wars.
Mozilla has already shown that it can run on the Raspberry PI, which is a very cheep device. I can see an opportunity for a Chinese manufacturer to bring out a dirt cheep smart phone/tablet for their domestic market and not worry about Apple/Google/Motorola or other patent parasites. Since they practice Real Capitalism in China (unlike the monopolistic pseudo-capitalism here in the US) I expect to see someone try this.
Maybe Firefox OS will be a dud. I honestly don't know. I am very interested to see how the effort turns out.
I do know that this kind of bashing is a form of public masturbation that is extremely popular on Slashdot. It's boring and stupid. Can't you go somewhere else when you decide to wank off in public?
Why is Snark Required?
Timecube?
If the battery life is decent enough, Firefox OS may be able to replace the S40 OS for Nokia Asha phones.
After Elop the Microsoft trojan horse had aborted Meego and Meltemi, this is more important than ever.
When you're just swapping pre-paid SIM cards to go from one provider to another, there's nobody to subsidize your phones for you.
I wish using the word "subsidize," especially by the telcos, to describe this would end. The one subsidizing the phone is the buyer, by locking themselves into an inflated monthly fee.
Read the reviews on that $49 Walmart tablet. This is what Firefox OS is trying to do away with. I develop games in HTML5, and even some of the better Android phones out there are still garbage in running them.
Luddite with no data plan here... any kind of data plan that I would consider worth having runs $70+/month - $840/year, I don't really care if the phone is free, I don't want to sign up for a multi-thousand dollar future debt.
Well, you didn't actually spell out what your requirements are, so I'm not interested in a comparison with moving goal-posts.
However, Verizon's 2GB plan is $90 (well over your $70 limit) while Virgin Mobile's 2.5GB plan is $30.
It's also prepaid so no contract, you can quit any time.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I like coverage that works where I live, $70/mo is Verizon's "family shareable" dataplan. We're dabbling with $15/mo for AT&T data on the iPad only, and in 3 months of paying for it haven't used it for anything other than the obligatory "let's see if we can get maps while we drive." Yup, can get maps while we drive. Great, too bad I know pretty much all the roads I use in the 3 states we travel in, without maps.
The next 2 billion who couldn't afford the other smart phones wont be able to afford a data plan either.
I did include them, because if the PERSONAL transportation is truly crucial to an ability to create that income, then it's not entirely foolish. Of course if other mobility options exist (public transportation, whatever) that would negate the need for the loan, then the vehicle is still a luxury with a big fat helping of rationalization on top. Regardless, kudos to you for arranging a "loan from a friend".
People in developing nations, or the not-so-lucky-ones in nations-on-the-decline could be getting a phone with smartphone features for the price of a burn phone. This means that the burn phone will get either smarter with shorter battery life, or the smart phones will have to get cheaper, including their ecosystem after purchase. Yes, data plans are ridiculously overpriced, since those are the new cash cows of the providers, but that won't last once 4G and WiFi will start to "blend" and people will be using guests and their own land lines for data so much that the telcos won't have a choice but to start offering data plans at reasonable rates again.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
So, their angle is to offer a "truly open platform" and pair up with hardware vendors to sell cheap devices to "emerging markets" instead of taking on iOS and Android directly. And I should think not since they are 5 years behind both of them.
But yet again what we see is another potential contender pay lip service to users by claiming that what they are clamoring for is an "open, flexible platform" that they're not getting in an iOS/Android world. And again when we read between the lines we see the true focus being put upon pleasing a handful of developers and ignoring what users are buying.
Is it easier on developers to write just an HTML5 app instead of writing to iOS, Android, Windows Phone and this platform? Perhaps.
Do users want a phone full of HTML5 apps? The trend right now is not likely. Most notably is Facebook dumping their HTML5 app for native.
Do customers really want a sluggish, bulky, battery eating device with things like Ogg Theora playback all for the sake of some ideal or do they want a solid, quick, battery efficient device? After 5 years since the emergence of iOS and Android the market has spoken.
Is this "emerging market" of low budget phones truly a viable market to fit in between feature phones and smartphones? Even if it is, what in the world does Firefox OS offer that is truly unique? There's nothing disruptive about it that I can see.
India. Africa. South America. Places where people have already "innovated" their own money exchanges, payment transfer, & order fulfillment systems based on nothing more than plain ol' text messaging.
You want to see what they can come up with in the way of improved ad-hoc decentralised systems like that, & the software to support it? Wait until they get their hands on a cheap phone with smartphone-like features.
(That said, the article is bullshit; nothing more than the usual 'Mozilla is a dynamic organisation identifying horizontally-integrated market opportunities!" fluff that comes up everytime anything with a different browser in is launched...)
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Because there's at least 2 1/2 billion of them, and only 300 million Americans?
One day soon, your country is going to get its economic arse kicked by poor brown people...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
You'll have to forgive Mr Coward. Mozilla and Google killed his parents.
I look at it as less than $900/year to have a significant percentage of human knowledge on a searchable device in my pocket. I know they're gouging me - a competitive market would provide the same service for cheaper - but even at these jacked up prices I consider it to be worthwhile without having to justify it as a business expense.
Alternatively devs could focus on using actual standardized development tools - something HTML5 is not and will not be for a very long time - such as opengl-es, instead of being baffled as to why they simply can't get the perf they want out of javascript running interpreted on a 1GHZ ARM CPU.
....for the start screen. And this is only if the disk check takes less than an hour though, otherwise the memory leaks pile up into an unrecoverable crash, requiring console access to manually delete the user profile.
I think your excellent experience with AT&T is a localized phenomenon.
I'm not sure customers outside Fantasyland generally have such a positive outcome.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It would appear so. A good attempt to mimic the style of Gene Ray, the worlds wisest human.
Required reading for internet skeptics
> Those of us who don't live in your California suburb and who have multiple devices ...
Yep. Or those of us who really, REALLY need our phones. I travel all over Alabama looking after 5 radio stations, some of which have towers in the middle of nowhere. I pay a premium for Verizon because to date, they've been best where I need to go. (Although I'll say this, coverage hasn't been same here -- with any carrier -- since the tornadoes came through on April 27th, 2011. Lot of damage from those things.)
I don't need fancy apps, but I do need text, email and a Web browser. I get that with the LG Ally that Verizon basically threw in when I signed up for another 2 years of indentured service-itude. :)
To be fair, I don't know how typical we are. Maybe most folks can get by with a barebones plan and spotty coverage. But to stay on topic, even in that case, I just don't see the appeal of this Mozilla OS, not now. Maybe 5 years ago, but not now.
But hey, I've been wrong before.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
One could argue children do not need data plans. Also, you can afford to "travel on weekends" but not pay for at least one $30/month data plan?
Sounds like your mobile plan is a business expense or you've chosen an expensive hobby. Either way it's not typical.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Same here actually. I've had unlimited data since I bought two original iPhones for me and my wife. We've upgrade twice since, now on 4S also.
$120/ month for both - voice and data, but no tethering allowed.
I have spent some bucks on the phones though. $699 each for the first two, $199 each after that. .
OTOH my wife hasn't had a laptop or PC since, so that's an offset and I haven't had to buy any game consoles for the kids, just pass on the old 3GS phones, so more offsets. Not quite break even but not too bad either.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
T-Mobile value plans are $40/mo for 500 minutes of talk plus 2GB of data. That's what I was paying on AT&T just for voice.
You have to bring your own phone, and the iPhone is not compatible with their 3G network. But I like my Nexus S well enough.
your loan isn't really 0%. The expected profits from the loan are simply baked into the sticker price (principal).
Why pay extra to Verizon? If you've got a (much cheaper) plan with Sprint, you get free roaming onto Verizon's network as well.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Boost and Virgin Mobile offer unlimited everything for less than $70, and that's on Sprint's nation-wide network, not just some cut-rate carrier. In fact $35-40 is more typical.
With iDEN/Nextel going away next year, Sprint's coverage should improve quite a bit as well, as they re-use those wonderful low frequencies that propogate so well, for 3G service.
Personally, I don't know why they'd want to prop-up 3G like that... I'd think they'd want to jump straight to 4G-LTE, so they get the great coverage on the most efficent, fasted, and most advanced and profitable network, and maybe replace their dumb 2G phones with LTE phones that only get a tiny LTE channel with dial-up speeds (or 3G speeds) on LTE.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Drive a half-hour out to Uncle John's farm and go camping, fishing, and hunting every weekend.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
There's not much I enjoy more than watching their expressions as they go through the various stages of emotion while playing with the devices
1. It starts with mild confusion — a sort of 'Why have you just given me an Android device?' look
2. Following confusion is sudden realisation that this isn't Android, it's built using JavaScript
3. After a short while the excitement starts in a sort of "Holy shit!" mind-blowing moment
So people get a "'Holy shit!' mind blowing moment" because they realise it was programmed in JavaScript instead of Java? That's only because they're programmers, and they know that HTML/JavaScript has historically had shit performance and a crappy UX. Try this with non-programmers, and they will have no reason to be impressed.
Users don't give a fuck whether apps are written in JavaScript or Objective C or Java or C#.
Let's do a car analogy here. Suppose you're at a dealer's lot, checking out a car. You're looking at a car that is totally average. Nothing special, and it even felt a bit sluggish during the test drive. So you're wondering why all your automotive engineer friends are so impressed with it. Then you ask them, and their response is "Did you check out the wiring harness? It's routed really cleanly! And all the drivetrain components are totally modular and extensible!"
This is what it feels like talking to programmers sometimes. It's astonishing how so many programmers just don't get it.
Apple got it. When the iPhone was first announced, Steve Jobs didn't get up on stage and talk for two hours about what language they developed the apps in. The iPhone wasn't awesome because it used Objective C. It was awesome because you could hold a web page in your hand and directly manipulate it with your fingers! It was awesome because pinch and swipe gestures made an app like Google Maps possible on a phone.
What does Firefox OS give users that Android doesn't? All these guys have done is recreate the Android experience using JavaScript. If the users don't know what JavaScript is, why should they care?
Firefox OS: Disruptive By Aiming Low
The male Slashdot demographic may want to cover their genitals.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
What currency do you use?
-- Cheers!
Or he lives in a place with really poor coverage. These places do still exist throughout the U.S.. I was in Alabama once when the best option out there was Alltel. I don't think Verizon was available yet. For myself, I have to have coverage when I go deep into desert or into the mountains. Whilst my use is professional, the people I run into daily need that coverage for their daily personal usage. That's always been Verizon's selling point aside from Moto phones.
Hey don't knock it if you haven't tried it, one of my friends got tired of being assraped on his contract so went and got this $79 Android prepaid and after he let me play with it for a half an hour?
Its...really not a bad phone actually. It plays music nicely, surfs just fine, videos looked decent, as decent as one can expect on a screen that small, overall I had to say i would have NO problem using that as my day to day smartphone. Hell he even slapped a 32gb Micro-SD into it and he uses it now as his PMP as well as a smartphone, its really not a bad little unit.
Which is why I just don't see what market Firefox is going for, I mean what are they gonna put it on? $10 Tracphones? I've used those things as throwaway phones for vacation so I don't have to give a crap about something happening to it and they REALLY suck when it comes to the CPU, we are talking seriously weak and laggy. Any FF put on something THAT weak is gonna be painful and make FF look bad, and as you and I have both seen anything more expensive Android has covered and already has 200,000+ apps for the 2.x line which is what most of these cheapies run.
Thanks for the tablet link though, I'm gonna have to take a spin over to Wally World and see if they have one in stock. I mean at $50 who cares if you kill it? This looks like a perfect new playtoy.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
From the post, this operating system uses the Linux Kernel to boot into a special Gecko run time environment. Does this mean I could set it up in a virtual machine and send SMS messages from my computer?
Society use your Sciences
Agreed. Cell phones are cheap as fuck. It's the service that beats you down.
Isn't that just how it looks like (at least) in the USA? Is this because you don't demand options, or don't care about options (as everybody will just take the most expensive phone anyway)? I mean, you have here people thanking their operator that they 'only' have to pay $40 a month and it covers (sub)urban California 'pretty well'. Is this a case of Stockholm syndrome or just looks like one (to an outsider)?
It is what it is.
> You could get one just for the bathroom.
I don't know. I hate the wiping fingermarks off that glass as it is.
More lies and FUD from the anti-FOSS troll.
Firefox is an excellent web browser, as its millions of users are fully aware
How can poor people kick economic arse?
-- Using the preview button since 2005
Who do you have for a carrier? Verizon requires you to have a data plan if you have a smartphone on their network.
I develop games in HTML5, and even some of the better Android phones out there are still garbage in running them.
Maybe you should start by searching for problems on your side ... html5 is not flash, you should not need the latest hardware for cool results.
According to this teardown:
http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/Pages/iPhone-4S-Carries-BOM-of-$188,-IHS-iSuppli-Teardown-Analysis-Reveals.aspx
Only about $15 of a $200 device is the processor. And that's the iPhone. So is there really any purpose to taking shortcuts on performance when it seems that's not what is driving costs?
I don't get it. You are implying that Firefox is bloated? Firefox is the leanest browser there is atm.
-- no sig today
40 $?
here in germany the prices range for example on eplus from 4 eur for 150mb to 15 eur for 15 GB, GRPS flatrate after that.
5 gb for 15 eur, not 15 gb, of course.
People from the 3rd world, who are still stuck on 2G-2.5G networks and want a nice device that does smart without the resource hungry part that comes with it.
For example, I bought a Samsung Galaxy Mini[1] because that was what I could afford. I bought it so I could use it as an occasional camera, surf the college Wifi if need be, use it as an ebook reader on the go, have a handy dictionary, and use it as a GPS tracker (these are my most often used apps on it; and I don't even use the WiFi and GPS so much, mostly a bookworm, so FBreader it is)
Point being, my needs are simple, yet need a smart phone for it (feature phone don't do it all). Yet despite having only a few apps, I am constantly running out of battery and worse, memory! Not the SD Card, the inbuilt memory, somehow google keeps using it up. And it's slow. Android is awesome on GB/GHZ plus hardware, but doesn't do modest hardware well.
Now say Firefox comes with OS that provides an upgrade from feature phones so that I can use the occasional Smart app, but over all runs resources like a feature phone, I think it will have a market. Oh sure it won't run HD videos or play high end games, but that's not what people like me are looking for either.
Which is why Jolla is starting with China for it's Meego phones, and Mozilla is looking at Brazil for Firefox OS. It's stupid to start with modest specs in the US, where the demand is for high-end, but it is equally stupid to push stuff that runs on high end on modest spec (and price!) phones that are in demand in other markets.
[1]: http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_mini_s5570-3725.php
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
How can poor people kick economic arse?
By being far more numerous than the rich people.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
and decrease the cost per 3G!
I take it you haven't used Firefox lately? Man I really wish they'd spin these research projects off and keep the browser devs focused on the damned browser. Used to be every release it got better, sure it had bugs but you could see real progress being made, each release was better than the last...not anymore, now it gets prettier but NOT better and on anything low power it gets curbstomped by any of the Chromium variants.
I'd normally say switch to Opera because it's fast and stable. Unfortunately Opera has been gradually fucking things up too. Moving the plugins into a separate process caused chaos so much that at least for the 32 bit Windows version they've been moved back to in process. What used to be a blazing fast, stable browser has got so bad I've switched to Chrome.
It's a shame really - I still prefer Opera. It has speed dial and a nice menu for unclosing tabs. It has a feature where you can click on a grabber at the side of the screen to see a list of book marks. It has a checkbox for "Reuse tabs" and if it is unchecked bookmarks open in a new tab. None of this is rocket science and some - the speed dial and the closed tab list can be done with extensions in Chrome. Still it's not the same as having this stuff in the browser - the Speed Dial 2 won't synchronize across machines, because Chrome Sync doesn't cover extensions. And Sexy Undo Close Tab loses the history of any tabs you close so the back button won't work. And there's no way to make bookmarks open in a new tab instead of clobbering the current one, which is irritating if you're in the middle of a slashdot rant.
So you have
Internet Explorer - bad. Used to be useful only IE. 6 only websites at work but those are increasingly broken in later IE versions. And to be honest I don't work at the sort of places that have IE 6 only websites that you have to use to submit timesheets, thank Hitchens.
Opera - My favourite UI but speed and stability have got worse and worse since they added a bunch of features. Used by approximately 0% of people, so no one tests their sites on it, though compatibility seems pretty good. Some things - Disqus comment threads will fail though. The low market share means a lack of extensions compared to Firefox or Opera.
Firefox - Firefox has always irritated me - every time I launch it it seems to need to restart. Slow and bloated. Useful only for demos of bleeding edge web stuff.
Chrome - Speed and stability are great, so long as you use Windows. Highly spartan UI. I wish they'd look at Opera and have options for a lot of the UI stuff that Opera invented.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
And I pay $9.70 for 1000 minutes, 1000 sms and 1GB full speed data with data being throttled but unlimited after.
Did I win?
You do know that you can turn off cellular data on almost every smartphone out there right? Yes, even the iPhone.
And I could care less about them and their pitiful existence.
Does it take work to be such a dick or does it come naturally?
The OS in Firefox OS is Linux. The model of "the web as an OS" is really a misnomer. What the web stack takes on is the UI, and that is a job it can very reasonably do.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
They're also fighting Moore's Law. The CPUs and GPUs that are in smartphones today are going to be in featurephones in 18 months. You don't make a difference by aiming for the low end, because the low end keeps moving. There's a lower bound for every generation on the cost of an IC, and putting something that's currently a low-end CPU in a featurephone just won't make sense in a year's time, when the cost difference between it and a significantly faster one is a few cents (and possibly in the wrong direction, because the faster ones are being produced in greater quantities).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm currently using China Mobile HK on a $35 (USD 4.5) a monthly plan. Includes 700 minutes air time iirc... not sure... enough for me at least. Used to be on New World Telecom, they have even cheaper plans available, as low as USD 2.5/month (but only 300 minutes air time a month). Great for second numbers that are permanently diverted to your main number.
And by the way, what does your carrier have to do with what phone you use? You buy them via your carrier or so? I never do that, they're always more expensive than the independent handset shop next door. If I were to buy one with plan (which is basically on instalment basis) they usually add data plans in the mix indeed. But of course that's not necessary.
You can buy unlocked iPhones directly from Apple, $549 for a 4S right now. I use mine with a prepaid reseller that works on AT&T and T-Mobile in the U.S. and has excellent coverage everywhere else I've been as well (Western Europe and Caribbean).
It already is and, unfortunately, he's running for re-election...
Will the user be able to control individual privileges? Maybe as sudo?
I'm not knocking it. I have a $99 prepay phone and a $110 tablet myself. The tablet doesn't have google play but Amazon and other stores provide plenty of apps. Came with ICS and capacitive screen. In fact I'm using the tablet right now.
that ChromeOS did.
Why not just install Adblock?
It's Firefox compatible...
Really.
These things will be awesome, and now, people can write them themselves!
About 4/5 of the world population.
Rethinking email
Sweet! I never understood the hatred and snobbery some folks get for the lower end stuff, some of it is great. I paid a grand total of $350 for my EEE netbook and that was WITH an 8Gb of faster RAM upgrade AND a carrying case and with that AMD E350 dual core the thing does 1080p over HDMI and gets 7 hours web surfing. Hell I've even played games like L4D, Crazy Taxi, GTA;VC (probably would play the others but I don't have them) and it all works just fine. Why would I pay more for an ultrabook when this does everything I need a portable to do? Just to show I have money?
But now you see why I don't get what market they are going for. I have seen Android 2.x on $69 phones and $89 tablets and as another poster wrote by this time next year feature phones probably won't exist simply because the chips they use will be more expensive than the chips in those $69 phones. So instead you'll see the $10 Tracphones with the same or more power than that $69 Android and it'll run the Appstore and do everything you'd want a basic smartphone to do just fine.
So where does that leave them? A market that won't even exist next year? Moore's Law means that feature phones are doomed, there simply won't be a point in making chips that weak anymore than there would be a point for Intel to make the Pentium II today, it would cost just as much if not more to make the shitty chip as it would the good chip so why make the shitty one? So if they would have come out with this 4 years ago? Yep could have seen what they are going for. But today the ODMs already know Android, its got hundreds of thousands of apps, and it is already absorbing the low end where JavaME and Symbian used to have a niche, so what is left? Where can they go?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'll be happy to elaborate.
Firefox is a piggie, not so much in memory as that HAS gotten better but in CPU spiking it royally sucks ass. I have an AMD E350 netbook and I can gain an hour of surfing time by NOT using Firefox, that ought to tell you something. I have a 1.8GHz Sempron in the shop I use as a nettop because it uses less than 40w under load. With Dragon or Chrome? Great web surfing, can even play 720p videos no problem, Firefox? Just launching will slam the CPU to 100% and make the entire machine unresponsive for 40 seconds to a minute and every action you do in Firefox will suck CPU cycles like a drunk at a free bar. Simply going through my bookmarks can hit 80% CPU...really? Just to look at the bookmarks? And Firefox suffers from what I call "senior moments" where the entire system will just hang, sometimes for up to a minute. The chrome variants? Just don't do that.
Don't take my word for it, take ANY software that lets you have a CPU gauge in the taskbar AnVir Task Manager is a good one but there are a ton to choose from, and then watch the gauge as you do various tasks in both FF and any Chrome variant. You'll find that FF pimp slaps the living hell out of the CPU, I don't care which extensions you have, while Chrome simply don't. In my own little tests I've found anything short of a 3.2GHz P4 with HT is simply unusable on FF 15, its senior moments (which is it slamming the CPU to 100%) simply make the entire experience painful.
Its a fricking browser, you shouldn't need a high powered multicore just to run the damned thing. If anyone doubts I'll be more than happy to post screencaps, it'll just take a bit as I'll have to blank out my bookmarks, or reinstall without my bookmarks installed.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Try the Comodo spinoffs, Comodo Dragon (for Chrome) and IceDragon (for Firefox) as they are really nice. There really isn't too much they can do with FF as its the Gecko engine that is really the root of the problem but their Chrome version has no phone home and I've gone from V5-V21 and NO UI changes,other than they moved the little Dragon eye from the right to the left side to give more room for the bar, big deal.
So give it a spin, like you I was getting irritated at the way browsers were going so I just spent a week trying every damned thing under the sun, even the more offbeat like SWIron and QTWeb (which is great if you need cross platform support, as it works on everything) and after trying a good dozen different browsers i finally settled on the Dragon and couldn't be happier.
Oh and if you ever have a problem? just pop on to their forums, their devs actually lurk there and are happy to fix any problems VERY quickly. I ran into a weird little bug with the last release where it didn't want to load my startup page, they spent about 10 minutes talking to me and then posted a workaround while saying they would be sure to have that weird little bug fixed for the next version. Really nice guys and 10 minutes from listing problem to workaround? Can't beat that.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
One day soon, [the US] is going to get its economic arse kicked by poor brown people...
Don't look now, but it has already happened. The economic recession in the US over the past few years was in great part triggered by the fact that so much manufacturing has moved to third-world countries with much lower wages. The US no longer actually builds much of anything; it just imports things and tries to sell them as cheaply as possible to people who more and more don't have jobs or have low-wage jobs. All the political posturing aside, this isn't being fixed by the US's "system".
The iPhone most other Apple products are poster children for this phenomenon. They're all made in Asia. Yes, the design was is great part done in the US, but that only employs a small number of people. The people actually making the hardware all "poor brown people". Or yellow people, if you prefer.
An obvious prediction is that the current topic is talking about what may be the follow-on products to Apple's vaunted phones, which will do well because it sells well to the growing American lower classes.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Until they hit our shores waving a saber, i don't give a damn about them. We have enough things to worry about where i live then deal with them too.
Oh, and we should be cutting off aid to your ungreatful 'poor brown people'. Who do you think keeps those sorry asses fed and supplied with medicines? Hint, its not themselves.
Screw em.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Because they did it long before iOS existed...
Travel is pay-as-you-go, decide to drive to the beach, pay $40 in gas to drive to the beach - enjoy the weekend, done.
Subscriptions are insidious grinding things that get forgotten and pile up to much larger sums than you realize.
We've had a $15/month data plan on the iPad for 4 months now, virtually zero use of it during that time, but we plan to have a need for it in October/November... we'll see how that goes, if not we'll kill it, but only after blowing $90 on the idea that it would be cool to have 3G data access on the iPad.
But, will Verizon support an iPhone with voice only service? They surely won't subsidize it with a voice only contract.
The US is still #1 in manufacturing, with a commanding-lead... More than the #2 and #3 ranked countries, combined.
What's more, experts will tell you that (because of transportation/energy costs, as well as improvements in technology in manufacturing, and rising wages in Asia) it's likely the US (and Mexico) will regain an increasing portion of foreign manufacturing in the next few years.
Your statements just show a tremendous ignorance of the subject, which you never-the-less feel the need to lecture other people on...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Hmm... Interesting. I don't get this experience on arch.
-- no sig today
I think the core of the strategy is HTML5. The web hasn't disappeared in smartphone/tablet app onslaught. FF makes it trivial for developers to adapt HTML5 apps to phones (if you even have to). It let's the owners of these phones and pads get straight at value on the web in a way where it's nicely integrated with the phone. This is a move to serve people who DON'T WANT TO BUY APPS not people who don't want to buy expensive hardware.
Every rule has more than one consequence.
"My experiences must mirror everyone else's, so this project will be an utter failure"
You are talking out of your ass. But it's fine. We all have our preferences and bad experiences, and it's understandable that you'd lash out at the worst of one product while pretending the other has no faults and everything is roses.
What OS?
That is like saying "You getting bad gas mileage in your truck isn't correct, because my bass boat gets GREAT mileage" as the Linux variant has VERY little in common with the Windows version, which considering that Windows still have over 85% of the market while Linux has 1.05%? NOT a good thing, not good at all.
But as I said see for yourself, take ANY version of Windows (I tried it on WinXP and 7) and place any of the free taskbar CPU meters in the system and watch. if its a system with a bunch of course simply set affinity to 1 core which will, while not giving you a perfect simulation, will get you closer to a low power system, which are still singles and duals, not hexas and octos.
I've tried this little experiment, in no particular order, simply listing what's in the shop I've tried it on, socket 754 Sempron and Athlon, Socket 775 P4 and Celeron, Brazos C50 and E350 APUs, and AMD Phenom I and Phenom II multicores and in every single one Firefox sucked MORE CPU than Chrome or Opera.
BTW friend if you are on Arch, mind a little advice? Try QTWeb which not only has nice features and frankly stomps FF when it comes to CPU usage but is also 100% cross platform, hell its even portable. Runs on all flavors of Windows, BSD, OSX, and Linux.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
"One day soon, your country is going to get its economic arse kicked by poor brown people..."
HA! We have steadily imported legions of our OWN PBP to meet the challenge!
Oh.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
It seems as though the unlocked iPhones are GSM only.