Slashdot Mirror
Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat
mattydread23 writes with an opinion piece naming a few reasons Firefox OS is likely to succeed "It's geared toward low-powered hardware in a way that Google doesn't care as much about with Android, it's cheap enough for the pre-paid phones that are much more common than post-paid in developing countries, and most important, there are still 3.5 billion people in the world who have feature phones and for whom this will be an amazing upgrade."
I'd push greater commitment to keeping the essential components of the system under FOSS licenses onto the head of that list.
But it needs a web browser. Does it run Chrome?
The entire premise of this article seems to revolve around the unsubstantiated claim that Android is poorly optimized for low-end devices. I disagree with that claim, so the entire premise of the article seems suspect to me.
Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat
Flamebait and hopelessly wrong.
I'd push greater commitment to keeping the essential components of the system under FOSS licenses onto the head of that list.
Except such a thing is irrelevant to all but a microscopic minority of nerds.
This explains so well your later point:
So you don't ever walk or hike anywhere, lardo?
He likely is unable to leave the basement without a chair lift.
They already said they want any mobile OS that doesn't allow the government to shutdown and make worthless any device that a protester owns. They know they constant huge occupy protests are just going to get larger and more powerful so they keep demanding to be able to brick devices own by the freedom fighters. Expect the contributors to this Firefox scheme to be put in prison for challenging the Republicans this way.
It will be the Netzero of OS's.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
"While there are now for the first time over a billion smartphones in use around the world -- a staggering number -- Ericsson estimates that there's an astonishing 4.5 billion people who own mobile phones. For those who paid attention in math class, that's 4.5 times as many."
huh??
firstly, the ratio is hardly needed to make the point...pretty sure everyone knows that 4.5 billion is alot more then 1 billion.
plus, i think the pointless math lesson would probably be more necessary for those who *didn't* pay attention in math class.
like an early poster mentioned...the author of this article is suspect.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
True, but U.S. CDMA carriers still refuse to activate low-end Android phones of today on a feature phone plan. And among U.S. GSM carriers, the one with more coverage still has a habit of automatically adding a data plan to a SIM with voice-only service inserted into a smartphone. These behaviors are why I still carry a tablet and dumbphone. Will carriers perform the same sort of tying on Firefox OS devices, or will they let customers use cellular voice with only Wi-Fi data?
They make shitty phones like that for old people, take some of your social security fun bucks to the nearest retailer and buy one please. Maybe then you won't feel the need to post shit like this every time modern phones are discussed here.
I don't know why people keep blathering about this. There are a lot of options out there for the 'phone-only' phones.
A quick google search brings up a recent top-10 list which reveals several decent choices. A couple of exames are: Samsung gusto 2 available for Verizon and Samsung Entro for Virgin Mobile.
Not all 3.5M people want a feature phone. Benefits of feature phones include: cheaper phone, cheaper plan, smaller hardware, longer battery life, less distractions (e.g., email, social media, games), fewer privacy concerns (e.g., tracking, malware), and smaller target for theft. Also, it's much easier to text from my phone's slide-out keyboard than from a touchscreen.
He likely is unable to leave the basement without a chair lift.
Which isn't necessarily something to be ashamed of, especially as people who graduated from college in the 1970s hit retirement age.
Can't help but think there's something wrong with mentioning "3.5 billion people", considering that's half the population of the earth. I very much doubt 1 person out of 2 has a cellphone. This might be the number of phones out there, but not the users.
It's over. Android has won. The iPhone will stay around with a significant market share. But current high specs for phones will be the low end in three years. 2GB Ram and a 1.5 Ghz Quad Core CPU with be in entry level Android devices in 2017. Enough to run Android any way you like.
Android already runs on so many phones. It already is ubiquitous. Microsoft might have a chance in a niche. Same as Firefox, if it comes down to it. The mobile phone market is a billion device market. Why not a couple thousand Windows or Firefox or Jolla or Tizen devices? Or Ubuntu for that matter.
Android already runs on low spec cheap entry level devices. Granted, it doesn't run them very well, but neither does Firefox atm.
Absolutely there are lots of people who cannot afford the top of the line smartphones out there
There are also people who can afford the phone but not the plan. Virgin Mobile, for instance, charges $336 per year more for service on an Android phone than for service on a dumbphone. I can keep service on a dumbphone for $7 per month, but if I wanted to activate an Android phone, that'd cost no less than $35 per month. Wouldn't carriers lump Firefox OS with the smartphones that require a data plan even if the subscriber plans to use only Wi-Fi data?
I'd push greater commitment to keeping the essential components of the system under FOSS licenses onto the head of that list.
If this really can work for ~3.5 billion people who currently don't have a decent mobile OS (a claim about which I remain skeptical), I guarantee you that at least 3.49 billion of them won't give a damn whether its FOSS or not. Of the remainder, most surely won't care whether its GPL, BSD, or PirateBay licensed.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
This is not an insightful, quirky observation about modern, overengineered gadgets that try to do everything but fail to do anything well.
It's a tired and overused rant being perpetually parroted by people who don't even want what they're asking for.
If you were actually looking for such a phone, you'd have done a simple web search and found plenty of phones in the $30 range with over a month of standby time, like the Nokia 105.
... That it will be the most widely used browser. It grew a lot early on, but other and in many cases better products came along. Firefox browser now is all but the leader. Given the identical marketing strategy is used for Firefox OS, I just don't see how it can only be conceived that it will become the Mobile OS to beat. Seriously, has the author ever seen one of the cheap android phones out of China?
That microscopic yet vocal minority with the power to verify the phone's operating system is probably the public's best hope against the snooping-as-usual practices currently popular among governments of certain industrialized countries.
It's not about the OS as much as it is about the carrier. In the US it's always been.
As a Firefox OS user since October, I wonder why this was modded as "funny" and not "insightful".
It's no secret that innovation in the low-end of the market is high on the priority of manufacturers. Margins are low, and in combination with carrier policies, it's much more profitable to focus on high end handsets. Low end one are few years ago tech, repackaged, with unoptimized software. Google itself has been guilty of pushing Android to perform well on the high end, neglecting the low-end. Gingerbread still lives because it is the last Android OS to perform somehow well on low-end hardware. Even Google Glass, heck, runs on Ice Cream Sandwich, because Jelly Beans is too heavy for it. KitKatt is supposed to bring a fresh approach to low-end devices, we will need to wait and see. But there are clear responsibilities in software and hardware makers if such low performing devices exists. So, just like it did on the desktop, I hope Firefox OS will provide the incentive for the "other" OSes to push the boundaries on the low-end.
And it will become the year of the Linux desktop....
And the Hurd will ship...
Wasn't KitKat designed for lighter footprint on smaller devices? They're not abandoning the low end. Also, computing history is littered with corpses of companies that tried to optimize for current hardware, but spent so much time/money that the hardware caught up to "bloated" software, and they were beat. Check out how this happened withWordPerfect. where they were so happy they used assembler, but lost to nimbler Microsoft. Having a business plan that depends that hardware doesn't progress much hasn't been too lucrative.
The writer needs to remember that the market changes rapidly. The iPhone as first introduced would hit this current market with a thud. Webapps on a 2G mobile browser? Yeah, not gonna sell.
Palm WebOS tried this already. Came from a company with some weight in hardware. Landed with a huge thud.
Ya think?
There's going to be a massive chicken/egg problem here. I don't pretend to know apps in developing countries, but Facebook dropped 19Billion to buy network effects in developing countries. It's still a big thing.
And lets not forget Tizen, and Sailfish. The OS waters they want to plunge into are not even empty. Good luck. I like Firefox, but they have huge headwinds.
Reminds me of my favorite UNIX joke:
Emacs would be great operating system if someone just wrote a decent text editor for it.
Which phones with 128MB or 256MB of RAM run a modern version of Android?
Just for reading the summary I can say this looks fishy. The latest Anroid release 4.4 was mainly dedicated to make Android run on smaller devices, adding tools to debug memory footprint, adding compresion of pages, sharing of things, etc. Google claims that now Android can run on a 512 MB device (which is fairly low end right now). And with ever decreasing memory prices is hard to imagine there's a place for a "lower than lower end" OS.
The "being open" reason is also not good enough. As a technology (i.e. removing Google services) Android is 100% free software. And the reason some telcos might want Firefox OS is to have a more closed environment which they can control.
Maybe Firefox could have been working to create its own Android fork, replacing Google service with Firefox services. That would be, IMO, much cooler.
If I remember correctly the cheapest phones are sold for US $12 on the street in China, which are sold for US $ 10 in larger quanities direcly from the factory:
http://www.bunniestudios.com/b...
New things are always on the horizon
This article is completely unaware of the realities on the ground. You can pick up a Kyocera Rise or Event at Radio Shack now with Android on it for $20 or less on sale. And KitKat is already being optimized for lower end phones precisely due to what he's saying. Firefox doesn't have a chance in hell against Google Play on a KitKat $20 phone in a year or two. It's DOA.
If Microsoft can't get a viable app store together after throwing millions at developers and having a really nice OS on low end hardware with decent market availability, what chance does Firefox have? None.
sudo apt-get install woosh
Lots of countries have laws that prohibit carriers from differentiating the pricing based on phone model
But how easy is it for a citizen of Dice's home country to get a work visa in those countries?
This OS is going to be huge. Android is a POS and deserves do die just like Microsoft OS.
You can easily buy a pre-paid Android phone for $40-$50 today. It's believable to me that with the steady progress of technology, $20 Android smart phones will be available in a year or two anyway.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
If you're doing wifi-only [...] use [...] SIP
That might work for people who make and receive calls only at home. Am I the only one who needs voice but not data while riding transit?
Saying they won't care is disingenuous. The majority don't know what a license agreement is. Knowing that is relevant to learning the benefits of free software. The majority of which who use free software also don't know the benefits. None-the-less they receive them and indirectly enjoy (and a reason many use free software) said benefits.
As an example:
Free software with proper security policies (trusted developer policies such as Debian has) enables additional security (why Debian's less risky to run than Android, MS Windows 8, etc). Other developers can see whats going into the packages and the code's work can be criticized easily. There is no major restriction on code/software distribution (ie that would prevent a distribution/OS from maintaining a repository).
The users can't be deprived of there data easily. There isn't a company that can say "we don't support version x" or "we've disabled y for security reasons" (rather than fixing the issues). All these things happen in the proprietary ecosystem routinely. That printer you've got that still works? Doesn't work with Vista? Manufacturer won't release updated drivers? Too bad. That kind of thing doesn't happen with free software routinely. It does happen with GNU/Linux, but only where users adopt hackish solutions to fix non-free problems (bought a shitty anti-freedom printer with a MS Windows system and installed GNU/Linux on it rather than buying a freedom friendly system from the get-go).
If they want it to run on low end hardware, they're going to have to fix the memory leaks instead of just pretending they don't exist.
Firefox OS is just trying to copy chromebooks these days.
The ZTE Open is $69 - $79 unsubsidized.
Huawei has three unsubsidized phones for $79 before rebates.
http://www.metropcs.com/metro/...
What's the advantage of the FFOS phone over the cheap Android phones?
What's a web search? And get off my lawn.
yesterday's hardware does what 99% of end users want.
I'm as guilty as the last review-fixated whore in obsessing over the specs of my current and potential future phones - but with the last gen I've hit a realization.
A 1080 screen is more than enough. My CPU and GPU are absolutely fine to run anything I need. Personally (HTC One) I'd *like* to know I could crunch a benchmark faster for my geek pride - but I can't for the life of me see how any phone upgrade costing me £500+ (less ebaying of my old handset) could potentially be worth the money for what I use my phone for.
Even stepping back to my last purchase - the Nexus was by far better value and I was swayed by pretty design (not that I see anything wrong with that). Just in the next gen I've seen so far I can't see anything more than mere incremental spec increase and entirely subjective design improvements.
They did.
I find it remarkable when people like you respond without knowing the first thing about what you're talking about. Would you like me to mail you my Android phone so you can experience first-hand what a piece of crap Android is on low-end phones? (Hint, if you wait too long to shut it off and restart it, then you're stuck pulling the battery out because it runs out of ram and becomes unresponsive. Booting is a five minute process. I have NOTHING installed except the base OS. I have ZERO apps installed, other than a memory optimization program that I bought to try and use the browser.
Just for kicks, I booted into Emacs once (init=/usr/bin/emacs in GRUB) - it works, but it's weird...
Ahh. Yesterdays Quad core chip with 2Gb of Ram will be extremely cheap in the next 6 months. Low end, light footprint OS tend to die off once hardware becomes cheap. The same will happen with Firefox OS.
Android will be come the base of most everything Android is the Linux everywhere we have been waiting for. Other Linux derivatives will come and go.
Bastetx
Self thought:
"Maybe it's time to upgrade my Nokia C2 for a Firefox OS phone.
I don't care a fancy phone with camera(s) and social netcrap.
I just need to call, maybe check mails, sometimes play a song and a lot of battery duration.
The C2 can last almost ~seven days, the mp3 player is a crapy one but usable.
I want to be cheap on phones... "
So, yes maybe there is a lot of people like me that only need the basics.
-
XP (rotate to see -XP- giving tongue to windows 8-hate.)
"Second: Yes, the developing world is growing and, yes, smartphone adoption is always rocketing up and, yes, eventually feature phones will be a thing of the past. But this won't happen tomorrow.
If they get people using low end phones accustomed to FirefoxOS then they have successfully developed a market share.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I don't know much about mobile phone markets around the world, but what about affordability of data plans? Does it have an impact? Modern smartphones can be used without internet access (at least Android can), but then they lose a lot of their appeal.
I guess, if the "Linux everywhere" you've been waiting for is little more than a launcher for strangely limited Java apps with an impossibly bad UI.
Dream bigger.
Required reading for internet skeptics
As always... Fuck Beta!
Hey just wanted to mention that the new improved Slashdot is great!
When Firefox went to constant updates, they broke all of their plugins over and over until devs changed over to addons; orphaning a ton of plugins and repeatedly breaking essential tools like firebug. The addon move opened the door to chrome and ie dev tools, which weren't even on my radar before.
What's their app story for OS upgrades?
I think you're confused. 512 is not low end. 128 is low end and that's the Firefox OS target for $25 smartphones (consumer pricing, not BOM).
The browser in Firefox OS doesn't even allow addons. No adblocker on mobile -- that's just cruel. I hope there will soon be a solution for that. Also, no copy/paste at all. Not in the browser, not in the email client, not in IM or SMS.
This might be the number of subscriptions out there, but not the number of people who have a cellphone. (Many people have more than one subscription, companies have phone subscriptions, etc.) There's another statistic that 6 billion people haveaccess to a mobile phone, but again, that's not the number we're looking for. If someone in a village sells minutes that doesn't make everybody in the village phone owners.
It doesn't run crysis
Not an Apple fan boy, but jeez was this easy. My 5c speakerphone microphone stopped working. 2 minutes at fancy Apple store on University Avenue in Palo Alto - here sir is a brand new replacement, please make sure you have a backup. Are you ready now (i.e. am I using iCloud ) or would you like to come back (non-cloud backup/ my preference)? Yes the iPhone is ridiculously over priced, and data plans are too expensive ... but the customer experience was very slick and I have to say I value that.
I almost feel like Apple should do a Mozilla OS phone, leverage all that FOSS/UNIX goodness but give user that platinum mechanical/industrial design, customer support, fancy ego stroking stores, high quality OS upgrade for years (on 4 generations of phones), ...
But its the UI design where FOSS gets stuck - Apple will never embrace anyone else's UI. If there were a way to have a mobile OS that could have proprietary UI maybe, but now we're getting into almost enterprise software nuanced value propositions that Microsoft / RedHat / IBM / Oracle / Google are still struggling with - and why Linux on the Desktop will always be a fad ... the best UI/Desktop for Linux will always be a web browser on another computer, go $%^# yourself X11/and other variants, um SteamOS, good luck!
well, er it doesn't work as well
How does my mobiles' hardware affect if the sim is post paid or pre paid ? Could anybody explain
Ha, that's sweet. I should try that sometime. single user mode in emacs.