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LG Reportedly Working On a Firefox OS Phone
SmartAboutThings writes "It seems that LG is going to join Alcatel, GeeksPhone and ZTE in the Firefox OS market. During an interview with Bulgarian online outlet Dnevnik.bg (in Bulgarian), LG's mobile communications head in Bulgaria spilled the beans on company's plans for the future. While he tried to refer only to plans that regard Bulgaria, it's obvious that he also spoke about LG's global strategy. Mister Valev said that LG is also looking to come up with a new Android tablet, phablet and even a smartwatch. Valev said LG is already working on a Firefox OS that could possibly be released in the first quarter of 2014."
* You don't have to install apps to use them.
* If they can pull off the update schedule (which they need to) it's going to be much better than Android for updates: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2013/07/19/mozillas-heartbeat-quarterly-firefox-os-releases/
* We need at least one more Open phone option
What is the point of making a Firefox phone? With the GNU/HURD phone being released very soon, it will make Firefox OS based phones irrelevant.
If they target it as a low to mid range phone option that's more substance over style, it could find a very nice market full of people that are kind of tired of the high-end expensive 2-year contract cycles.
Or they could go after the already saturated high-end market and fail miserably.
Easy - it's an OS that OEMs can customize heavily. It's not what Firefox brings to the table, it what's the OEMs can do to differentiate their phones in the market. Basically, LG wants to have a phone to sell they can call their own. Android's fairly big and complex so it's hard to fully do what you want with it. Firefox OS hopefully promises to be much simpler so each OEM can "make it their own".
Plus, the price is right.
Except there are TONS of low-end Android phones. In fact, they're one of the largest reasons why Android beats iOS - why should someone spend $200 for an iPhone 5 when the sales guy is pushing their 3-Android-Phones-for-free deal?
Even best sellers like SGS3 are barely 10% of the Android market (60M units vs. 900M Androids) - and Samsung has 80% of that market. The rest of the phones are the ones they're releasing practically daily - all the million variations of low end phones you can go and get for free or so. So the top end phones do sell tons, but the low end phones get shoveled out the door.
Updating the phone is the weak spot of Android. However, I'm not sure what the benefit of not needing to install apps to use them have, other than perhaps cause confusion to end users about what app they are even using at any given moment. Unless done well, this has the potential to be a security nightmare.
Pretty good question. My understanding is they bought it for their Smart TVs.
This is actually a pretty good idea. I have one of their Smart TVs, and the UI is ugly, inconsistent, and a little buggy. LG might be a decent hardware company, but they lack Apple's knack for building decent UIs. It makes sense to me for them to pay for an OS where somebody has already done a lot of the thinking about how things ought to work.
As for why they can't use it for smartphones, too, I think the reasons are twofold: 1.) Although it was based on "the web," WebOS had more proprietary/nonstandard stuff in it than Firefox OS does, which makes it harder for it to gain momentum. That's not so much of a problem in the Smart TV world, where pretty much nothing has any momentum yet. 2.) The perception is that WebOS has already failed as a smartphone OS. For LG to put another smartphone product out now based on the same "failed OS" would be a pretty big gamble.
Breakfast served all day!
LG? They're making a phone for Mozilla. Rebranding their assembly of chips and plastic makes them money.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
This is a niche product that will never ramp to significant volume. You heard it here first.
Its "niche," though, is people who are using feature phones and are thinking about buying their first smartphone. For these people, the main draw of a smartphone is being able to access the web. Firefox OS delivers that at a price point of $80, or even less with carrier subsidies. It won't ramp to a significant volume in rich countries, but there is a much larger "significant volume" of customers in places like China, India, Brazil, Latin America, etc. So you never know.
Breakfast served all day!
Ah! The original Smartphone. They should call it the Samsung Max 86.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
Or, maybe they realised they made a mistake after the purchase.
Granted this is all hearsay and subjective. But if LG bought webOS and found that it did not suit their needs, and their mobile strategy requires a separate platform from iOS and Android, that might push them towards early adoption of FirefoxOS.
I don't see the distinction. OEMs already can (and do) customise Android. If the customisations go even further than that, essentially every OEM will be producing their own fork of Firefox, all of which will be incompatible with that of other OEMs. This will likely mean every OEM has its own small pool of proprietory apps. I don't see how that can compete with the iOS or Android ecosystem.
I'm not even going into the horror of how to manage upgrades.
Further, what's in it for the customer, the actual user of the phone? OEM customised experiences tend to be viewed as restrictive and loathed by their users (just see what Samsung users say about Touchwiz, HTC users about Sense, Motorola users about MotoBlur etc..). The demand for Nexus and stock Android phones also suggests that heavy OEM customisation is not popular.
Here is what I personally don't get...why is there all these cheers about MozOS? What problem EXACTLY does it solve, well other than giving phone carriers the ability to have their own locked down appstores which is the gist i got from their original announcement.
I don't know, maybe I'm missing something here, but android is already FOSS, hell you can take most phones and install your own image from Cyanogenmod or AreaRomQ or wherever there is one that works on your particular hardware (a problem MozPhone won't solve as it all comes down to the drivers) and pretty much do what you want with it, oh and its free as in beer as well, so what EXACTLY is the advantage for the user to get a MozPhone over an Android or an iPhone?
So pretend I'm the customer and I currently have an LG Android phone...which ironically is exactly what i have as my damned contract finally ran out so I got an LG slider and went prepaid, but I'm in the store looking at the phones and you believe in MozPhone so sell it to me...what EXACTLY does a MozPhone do for me the customer that my android don't? What are the advantages that MozPhone brings over Android? Because I've been watching this develop as I'm having more and more to support phones and tablets and so far I have yet to see anybody say anything about MozPhone that would make me want to give up my android for it.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I made a kinda sarcastic remark about this earlier, but what I see is the MozPhone is based on a modern browser that can run programs. So no need for Flash or Java or any of that BS and we can go to webapps that don't care if they're running on a specific phone os/hardware or intel or whatever.
But of course that doesn't mean shit for the life of this phone, 'cause there's no rush to rewrite everything for HTML5. That would kill the App Market which, so far, has been much more profitable than begging on the internet for subscribers.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
Sorry but your analogy? Giant FAIL, massive on the level of fail in fact. You see IE had SEVERAL problems, major problems that Mozilla solved. 1.- IE had been abandoned by MSFT once they had "won" the browser war so it was becoming more and more creaky and crashprone, 2.- ActiveX left a hole you could drive a truck through with the OS, 3.- Bug and security fixes were practically non-existent because the team had been broken up, thus making it more and more risky.
Compare this to MozPhone, which even though there is a LOT of people advocating it here when I said simply "sell me on this phone" NOBODY could do it, not a single person could come up with a single reason why i should give up my Android for this phone.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Actually there's huge volume of dumbphones in rich countries too.
Me I'd be tempted to get a Firefox phone and use it with no SIM card, wifi only, assuming I really need it which is not a done deal yet.
My dumbphone with insanely cheap voice only / free SMS plan would permanently stay in my pocket or very near me the way it is now.