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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.
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.
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?
No, expect 100% for this OS to be a part fo the Government scheme.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
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.
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.
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.
From the "Measuring the Information Society" report report prepared by the United Nations International Telecommunication Union:
"Between 2010 and 2011, mobile-cellular subscriptions uptake of both fixed (wired)-broadband and mobile-registered continuous double-digit growth in developing-country markets, but an overall slowdown in comparison with previous years. The number of mobile-cellular subscriptions increased by more than 600 million, almost all of them in the developing world, to a total of around 6 billion, or 86 per 100 inhabitants, globally".
Your doubts are wrong.
It's 3.5 billion have a feature phone, a smaller part of the human race has a smartphone.
But more than have of the people on this planet does own a phone.
New things are always on the horizon
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?
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.
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
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?
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?
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?
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.
A bill introduced by a Democrat and co-sponsored by 13 Democrats (and 0 Republicans) is clearly a Republican initiative.
Just for kicks, I booted into Emacs once (init=/usr/bin/emacs in GRUB) - it works, but it's weird...
Yep. There are lots of people with no running water and no electricity who have a phone.They charge them up using solar panels, car batteries, or get them charged at stores.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
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
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?
Sounds like you just bought a crap phone. Hint: Next time, pay $5 more to buy a phone from somewhere with a hassle-free return policy.
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!
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.