Firefox OS 1.1 Released, Mozilla Prepares For 2nd Round of Device Launches

SmartAboutThings writes "Mozilla has officially introduced the first update to its mobile Firefox OS. The very first update to Firefox OS adds some important new features, performance improvements and additional language support. Some of the most important changes include MMS support, Push Notifications API, Contact Management enhancements, Firefox browser downloads, Keyboard improvements and much more. In a separate announcement, Mozilla also said that new launches of Firefox OS smartphones will begin soon with more devices and in more markets around the world."

Comments

Great device

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a Firefox OS device. It's very cool and it's nice to have alternatives to android and apple.

Didn't know it launched.

[WiiVault]

Not trying to troll or anything, but despite a casual interest in Mozilla and mobile OS's and being an avid desktop FF user I had no clue it was out of beta. No doubt I missed a post or two, but considering I use FF Mozilla's top product and am often sent to their site to report bugs I really think they should fire their marketing people. Breaking into mobile is hard. If a guy who has been using FF since it was still called Phoenix isn't aware you put out a final product I would venture to guess the people who just stopped clicking the big blue E on their desktop are not likely to be coming out in droves. Something has gone seriously wrong at Mozilla over the last few years and this is just another example.

Re:Didn't know it launched.

[BZ]

Are you in a market where it's available in stores? The marketing has mostly focused on those markets, obviously.

That said, the launch was covered on Slashdot back in July: http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/13/07/09/1414232/mozilla-launches-firefox-os-devices-in-stores-opens-up-app-payments and several other articles, as well as other tech press. No non-tech-focused marketing in the US so far, since it's not like you can buy one of these in a store in the US right now...

Re:Didn't know it launched.

[4wdloop]

I just found out you can buy a FF OS Phone for $80 on eBay (for development I suppose)

http://www.ebay.com/itm/281165818989

Re:Didn't know it launched.

[steelfood]

The answer is simple: It's not ready. I mean, it's probably ready for release as production software, but as a phone OS, it doesn't appear to be ready to be exposed to the majority of the world. For example, 1.1 just got MMS capabilities. Based on just this alone, 1.0 would have just been laughed out of the market.

Their current target, I suspect, are enthusiasts and very, very early adopters. It's the people who don't really care that their phone is missing half of the basic features found on other phones. It's people who are more interested in developing applications (add-ons?) for the OS than for people who want to use the phone.

I expect you'll see them ramp up their marketing efforts as the software becomes more feature-complete. Until then, it's just not ready for end users.

Re:Not Version 2.0?

[BZ]

The target audience is people who don't have a smartphone yet, most probably because they can't afford to pay for a $500 phone. Which is most people in the world, so far.

Intorducing the new Slashdot Phone!

[Anonymous Coward]

Get hourly updates featuring
-Vague laws misinterpreted by engineers to be threats to privacy/civil liberties
-The latest release of every obscure Linux distro and its shortcomings compared to 10 other distros
-Factually spurious articles about the death of the IT industry
-Philosophical flame wars about the validity of alternative energy/electric cars
-Mental masturbation regarding drones/macs/climate change
-Hypothetical discussions of Rasberry Pi created by Arduino driven 3-D printers purchased with BitCoins
-Windows 8 trolling

Available Apps Include
-Car Analogy Generator
-Library of Congress Unit Conversion
-XKCD Reference Linker
-Shill Detector
-Basement Leak Sensor
-Voice Wreck Ignition Citation Search Engine

Fully compatible with
¦Android
¦BlackBerry 10
¦iOS
¦Nokia Asha
¦Sailfish OS
¦Windows Phone
¦Windows RT
¦Bada
¦BlackBerry OS
¦Grid OS
¦Linux
¦Mer
¦S40
¦Brew
¦SHR
¦Symbian
¦webOS
¦Tizen

*Unicode support included in a future update

It's been half a year

[FuzzNugget]

I figured they'd be on version 47 by now.

Re:It's been half a year

[Like2Byte]

I figured they'd be on version 48 by now.

Well...your post was over an hour old when I read it.

That's nice and all..

[excelsior_gr]

Firefox OS is nice, but what it really needs is a good web browser.

Re:That's nice and all..

[VortexCortex]

Herd mentality is the most predictable of all human responses. But, rest assured, this will be the sixth time we have re-invented PostScript, and we have become exceedingly efficient at cocking it up.

It's drag'n'drop easy to create webapps for.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can even do it live while hosting a podcast

Re:Not Version 2.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

A platform so open you can create apps from inside a webpage using drag'n'drop

Re:Websites wont render

[Billly Gates]

Another issue is we have IE 6 back again in style.

Its name this decade is called webkit.. If the web server detects it is a mobile device it outputs Webkit specific (chrome/Safari) CSS that is not W3C compliant.

Complain and the answer is webkit owns 95% of the market so go fsck yourself and buy a droid or iphone like everyone else. Kind of like we do not support Netscape anymore in 2003 even though you used Konsqueror or Firefox .4.

Drives me nuts to see the same developers who praise webkit and use non W3C compliant html5test.com to base their opinions then go out and bash IE 6 and who write code on the mobile end that wont work Windows Phone/Windows 8 either.