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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.
1.3 build is f'ing awesome. Most of the problems with have been fixed. This is coming from somebody who was extremely critical of it (even though excited initially because of its freedom aspects). After 1.2 and finally 1.3 (on the ZTE open) it actually works pretty well. I'm not this person. I think 1.0 release with ZTE open (I have this version, haven't tried 1.3... which is like a beta release or not even) worked OK, but it definitely has some early-adopter type issues. Lack of apps (not that I'm a big app person), lack of integration (can't sync/backup my notes or pull in Google contacts? or something like that easily, but you can export them for Google and import or something in some hackish way- and that worked good enough for me), etc. The only complaint remaining by the overly critical friend of mine is that he can't connect to his mail server because it has a self-issued ssl certificate and not way to accept it.
Kitkat has a minimum RAM requirement of 340MB.
Prototype developer hardware, such as the ZTE Open, has 256MB. Mozilla are investigating running FFOS with 128MB.
What is wrong with AMD? The dirty little secret of the CPU industry is that chips went from "good enough" to insanely overpowered several years so unless you are doing a job that needs every last drop of power you can squeeze (wave simulation, heavy number crunching) you'd be hard pressed in a blind trial to tell an AMD from an Intel....except when you got the bill and saw how much money you can save.
Check out the AMD Jaguar quads for example (if you can find one, they are selling like hotcakes) for what you can get for cheap nowadays. We are talking 4 Jaguar cores (the same cores powering the XBone and PS4) with Radeon HD8400 GPU capable of running 1080P video with a board that will hold 32Gb of RAM, all for $150. If you want insanely cheap you can grab an AMD E350 which I've used a LOT of in the shop and which makes a cheap and easy upgrade path for all those aging power piggie P4s, simply slap in a PCI to IDE adapter and they can keep their old drives while getting an upgrade to dual cores that again will do 1080P while using less power under load than a P4 does idling. So I'd say we HAVE a good competitor, frankly the only slot where AMD doesn't have a competing product is in the ultra hardcore market and that is a teeny tiny niche compared to mainstream.
As for TFA? I'd say its gonna all come down to support. If Mozilla can take control of the update process away from the carriers, who have a vested interest in trying to get you to buy a new phone, so that all MozPhones get say 3 years of updates? Then I think they really have a shot here in the states too as I don't know how many folks I've talked to that are seriously pissed at their Android phones because the carriers are so piss poor when it comes to pushing updates. Hell even the $300+ phones are lucky if they even get a year of support from the carriers and it makes folks feel ripped off, If Moz can get out a decent dual core phone at a sweet price ($150 or less should be doable with a dual core and a Gb of RAM) they could really grab some share away from Android, and this is from someone with an Android that I love but I had to ROM it to get a later version. Offer me a dual core for $150 or less that gets 3 years of support? I'm there.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.