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Firefox OS 1.3 Arrives: Dual SIM Support, Continuous Autofocus, Graphics Boost
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla today released Firefox OS version 1.3 to its partners for implementing in their smartphones. There are many new features for both users and developers, and the first phone to feature them is the ZTE Open C, which is available for sale as of today on eBay. First and foremost, Firefox OS users can expect dual-SIM dual-standby (DSDS) support, which gives you two lines on compatible phones, a popular feature in emerging markets. DSDS lets dual-SIM devices individually manage two different SIMs for calling, texting, or data through the 'SIM Manager' interface."
With Google Voice, skype, Takatone, and the like (not to mention call forwarding), you can already have multiple lines ring on the same single smartphone in your pocket.
prepaid sim can get you some of that.
Can anyone show me some doc on how long the Open C will get official updates for?
Wow. Nokisoft limited but *again* decreasing, earned share in western Europe by being the cheapest (its flagship *giggle* phones none existent) is now challenged with a real (I mean unsubsided mass marketed) great value smartphones. I hope Micro$oft the bully fails again with carriers and allows competition against the Android Platform (iOS exists only through the power of baby unicorn farts, and simply a different market). Seriously enough is enough, and Firefox fighting upwards with compelling dual sim technology burnt into the OS impresses with diverse western european cities. Maybe we will get that second ecosystem that everyone...sorry Micro$oft's Marketing is talking about.
You don't need Google Voice or Skype. There are plenty of dirt-cheap SIP providers out there. Cynnagenmod and a few phones with stock Android has a working SIP stack (I know some phones have it disabled, for those there are SIP apps). I personally don't have a SIM-card in my phone anymore. That is mostly to avoid the tracking involved with using those, your personal preferences may vary. I do not get to make phone calls when walking from place to place but I do get to call others who use SIP free and the rest cheap when I am places (almost everyone has a wifi and most local public places also have one, there's even wifi on local busses here).
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Today we have quad core multi-ghz CPUs with gigabytes of memory and 1080 displays. Having installed Linux from floppies on hardware orders of magnitude less capable is it now really too much to ask to have UI execute from a real non-nerf'd operating system?
Why can't I compile and run whatever software that will run on desktop on my phone?
Humor has it Apple's next iPhone will support dual-SIM too, but you'll have to buy a dongle that hangs off the lightning port for the extra SIM card.
You can rewrite and rehook around dependencies from most x86 *nix compatible software to whatever architecture your phone is running as long as you have a compiler and know what you're doing. You can also certainly do the same on Windows software to Linux, the source code maybe being a longer pole in the tent than in the first case. Are you sure you two are at the right news site?
I know this seems like a rather basic question, but why did Mozilla decide to create B2G? I mean, "everything is a web app"? So fucking what, does that give every app some more intrinsic value because it has "web" in the title?
The way I see it, they've taken valuable resources away from supporting useful projects like a standalong mail client (Thunderbird) and internet suite (SeaMonkey) and pissed them away developing Yet Another Mobile OS. I'm probably going to go for an Android phone for my next phone. Why would I go with Firefox OS? It's less mature, and I see nothing about its fundamental nature that makes it better than Android.
More "open"? Look at who wrote most of it's specs - it's Mozilla and Google. At the end of the day, if Mozilla stop supporting it, you're screwed. Just like if Google stop supporting Android, you're screwed. Why B2G ever got off the drawing board is a mystery.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
In what way is your mobile OS nerf'd? And do you want a mobile OS that takes up 5GB of your root partition for features like projector attachment, .NET support, support for *insert whole graphical library for just one application here* and use cases that 99.99% of us will never use?
What features are you missing on your phone?
This is an honest question. How does the overhead of having all apps written in Javascript affect battery life? There are tools to compile Android apps to native indtead of Dalvik, and the perormance boost is substantial. I’d expect that the performance comparison between Javascript and native would be orders of magnitude. Now, I realize that most of time, phones are either idle or asleep, but all that extra CPU time for every interactive event has got to add up.
The real performance bottlenecks have to do with RAM, and just-in-time compilations (though that is often cached). Even number-crunching apps can use asm.js to approach native performance, and even if the gap isn't fully closed there just aren't many apps that require that much performance for a simple smartphone. If you wanted the best possible performance you'd be wasting much time, because it's not JS that's causing most of the performance issues on something like FirefoxOS, but simply the RAM usage and the graphics stack being a bit slipshod in places (though both aspects are being actively improved a lot in FirefoxOS).
Nice in your city but is that generally true worldwide?
Wifi is ubiquitous these days but (OMG! terrorists) I rarely see open access points. Local coffee shops may offer free wifi but most places I need 3G connectivity.
It makes little or no difference. The energy hog on a smartphone is the screen. Virtually everything else pales in comparison. The only time it becomes an issue is if some app is continuously running, which happens with Android occasionally, but then it's not going to matter if it's Javascript or raw handcrafted ARM assember.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
While the difference between ASM, Java bytecode or JavaScript bytecode isn't very big in energy consumption, it will give a noticeable increase in "snappiness" in the UI if you get everything in asm. JIT runtimes are amazing at what they can do with the efficiency of the bytecode, but compiling it takes time so users will experience UI lag every time a compile kicks in. The compile itself will take extra energy so yes, there is some impact on battery life as well.
Regardless, users will think an app is "slower" because the time it takes before it does what they tell it to do is longer in some circumstances. They don't care about efficiency of bytecode interpreters and on the fly optimizations.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
There's quite some public and semi-public (needing codes, leeching from ISP customers) wifi where I live but it may be unreliable, may be too slow or disconnect and of course will be plain unavailable if you're not at the right place.
It may work.. But how do you receive calls? Only would work when you connect to access points and have reliable service. So you're uncallable most of the time and rely on others having a real mobile phone so you can call them. But it's an interesting way to deal with the absence of pay phones.
.
The last thing I would want would be a dependence upon an operating system from those change-happy short-sighted developers.
Wake me up when they finally implement Landscape Keyboard mode outside their mobile Firefox browser.
I mean come on, from 1.0 to 1.3 (and still in 1.4 and 1.5 alphas as we speak) you still need to type EVERYTHING on a tiny portrait keyboard. That means calendar, emails, text mesaging, instant mesaging... everything but what you do on the web browser.
I can't even begin to describe how frustating it is to have the capability of rotating the keyboard in the web brower but not on the rest of the system.
This make absolutely no sense when you think their target market is lower-end phones with "reasonable" screen sizes. Meaning you abso-fucking-lutely need to use everything you can get when you want to type something without making 3 typos a word.
Having that said, I still believe firmly in this project, and in the need of a less-bloated-smartphone-OS than Android, not developped by a company with a history of privacy violations (While still tied to the advertising world, I don't recall Mozilla being anywhere on the PRISM slides), and built on open standards.
My main concerns, however, remain:
- Reaching critical mass
- Getting a decent crypto API (full disk encryption etc.)
- GETTING THEIR KEYBOARD TO ROTATE
Wait and see.
Segmentation Fault in "Life, Universe and Everything" at line 42. Don't Panic.
Look up asm.js?
If you have firefox installed check this out as Unreal 4 engine was ported to Firefox JS.
The link even has a demo you can run? The fact is Google does not want to port this as they want us to use proprietary dart and other technologies optimized for Android. But with Firefox OS you can do a lot with javascript iwth JIT and hardware acceleration.
http://saveie6.com/
All true, and a great article. Still, I already bought a couple Kyocera Hydro water-proof cell Android Smartphones for $50 or so each, and hardware costs are falling fast, so it is not clear that OS footprint matters much in the USA, although maybe in Africa and China and India it still does.
That said, Mozilla could instead have focused on its XPCOM technology to ride above the OS in a cross-platform way (somewhat like VIsualWorks Smalltalk or now Qt or some others):
https://developer.mozilla.org/...
https://developer.mozilla.org/...
And Mozilla could also develop democracy-empowering apps and standards on top of that XPCOM platform for everyone, including ones for collective civic sensemaking and a semantic desktop like I talk about here:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...
If I was leading Mozilla, that is what I would have focused more on. Firefox OS on a Smartphone or elsewhere is a great idea in theory, but seems like a nonstarter in practice as far as *extensive* adoption in the Western world (even if I myself might buy a phone with Firefox OS on it preferentially for FOSS and privacy reasons). Google succeeded against iOS with mobile phones from nothing to 80% Smartphone market share in a few years because Google had deep pockets and a lot of good will at the time and was at the beginning of an exponentially growing marketplace. Mozilla may have the good will (although not at the scale Google had then among consumers) but it does not have the deep pockets. It also faces an entrenched mobile Smartphone landscape at this point with Android. Plus it does not have a compelling broad service offering like Google had with search and gmail to go with the phone (so people will just use Firefox OS to use Google Search, Gmail and Maps?). What money Mozilla has is almost entirely coming from Google (about a billion dollars total over the last few years), where only about a million a year is in individual donations. While there is a lot a few sharp developers could do if funded with even just a million dollars in donations a year, if Google pulls the plug on Mozilla's funding if Firefox OS were to even hint of being a successor for any other reason, where does that leave Firefox OS? Probably not stuff I should be saying in public given I just applied for a "Software Engineer, Platform" job at Mozilla, but what the hey. :-)
http://careers.mozilla.org/en-...
I love the Mozilla mission of FOSS software to support open standards (with the exception I feel Mozilla made a big mistake on not backing WebSQL built on SQLite as a defacto standard). However, getting people to *install* anything as an uphill battle, let alone buy anything. That's a big reason web-browser-hosted software is winning over the desktop and why I'm moving more of what I do in that direction. Even Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls moved that way with the "Lively Kernel" because they could not get many people to download Squeak. And getting people to install a full OS is an even bigger battle. Plus there are other groups making alternative phone platforms (Ubuntu, Android forks, WebOS from HP, more). So, given limited funding available for FOSS web stuff, and also given Mozilla has other great initiatives worthy of more support including "Webmaker," it is sad to see so much Mozilla resources and mental bandwidth go into something like Firefox OS that seems unlikely to gain much traction given the computing landscape we now have. And instead, the core Mozilla applications like Firefox and Thunderbird languish relatively speaking as far as bug fixes and innovation. The biggest change just recently with Firefox is it looks more like Chrome... As a "lazy" d
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I would like to be able to make untraceable prank calls, where I can call anyone and have the phone number show up as whatever number I choose. Or not show up at all - for things like prank calls or ransom demands or confidentail informant. I would like this feature to be able to turned on or off. In software, not with a hardware switch. This is a very important feature for me.
You can already do that. Sign up for just about any online voip service out there and all of this is very easy. How do you think the telemarketers pull it off?
Well as a followup, I got a generic email yesterday from Mozilla saying I did not get the Mozilla "Software Engineer, Platform" job. Fast turn-around considering I applied last week -- probably not related to this post saying Firefox the app was more import than Firefox OS, but I'll never know? Kind of sad, as it can be hard to find well-paying mostly-work-from-home gigs -- especially doing righteous and interesting non-profit-y stuff like Mozilla does. Such jobs are very few and far between. I felt the same way when I applied to Mozilla about three years ago for a Thunderbird support job and did not get it -- I said then I'd like to turn Thunderbird into a social semantic desktop platform eventually (which I still think is a good idea). Firefox and Thunderbird are tools I've used every day for over a decade and it would have been nice to make them even better while still being able to pay the mortgage and feed my family. Well, at least it is good to know someone else will get such a worthwhile opportunity; I hope that person makes the most of it.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
All true, and a great article. Still, I already bought a couple Kyocera Hydro water-proof cell Android Smartphones for $50 or so each, and hardware costs are falling fast, so it is not clear that OS footprint matters much in the USA, although maybe in Africa and China and India it still does.
Great! So these lower costs will also reflect on Mozilla's device. Won't you be glad the day they mass-produce these and they cost less than 50USD? (by the way, 50USD can be a few days or even a week's salary in some places of the world).
That said, Mozilla could instead have focused on its XPCOM technology to ride above the OS in a cross-platform way (somewhat like VIsualWorks Smalltalk or now Qt or some others):
https://developer.mozilla.org/...
https://developer.mozilla.org/...
And Mozilla could also develop democracy-empowering apps and standards on top of that XPCOM platform for everyone, including ones for collective civic sensemaking and a semantic desktop like I talk about here:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...
If I was leading Mozilla, that is what I would have focused more on. Firefox OS on a Smartphone or elsewhere is a great idea in theory, but seems like a nonstarter in practice as far as *extensive* adoption in the Western world (even if I myself might buy a phone with Firefox OS on it preferentially for FOSS and privacy reasons).
That's why they're not targeting traditional western markets, but emerging and underdeveloped ones.
Google succeeded against iOS with mobile phones from nothing to 80% Smartphone market share in a few years because Google had deep pockets and a lot of good will at the time and was at the beginning of an exponentially growing marketplace. Mozilla may have the good will (although not at the scale Google had then among consumers) but it does not have the deep pockets. It also faces an entrenched mobile Smartphone landscape at this point with Android. Plus it does not have a compelling broad service offering like Google had with search and gmail to go with the phone
That's your prespective. A lot of peope will see if from the other end "oh, good, it's not tied to google's services and I can use my existing email accounts and stuff".
What money Mozilla has is almost entirely coming from Google (about a billion dollars total over the last few years), where only about a million a year is in individual donations. While there is a lot a few sharp developers could do if funded with even just a million dollars in donations a year, if Google pulls the plug on Mozilla's funding if Firefox OS were to even hint of being a successor for any other reason, where does that leave Firefox OS? Probably not stuff I should be saying in public given I just applied for a "Software Engineer, Platform" job at Mozilla, but what the hey. :-)
http://careers.mozilla.org/en-...
I love the Mozilla mission of FOSS software to support open standards (with the exception I feel Mozilla made a big mistake on not backing WebSQL built on SQLite as a defacto standard). However, getting people to *install* anything as an uphill battle, let alone buy anything.
Yes, getting users to install stuff is imposible (unless it's virus.exe). I'm not certain they'll succeddin android-dominated markets, and least not in the short run. But there's plenty of other markets.
That's a big reason web-browser-hosted software is winning over the desktop and why I'm moving more of what I do in that direction. Even Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls moved that wa
I'd like to think it's unrelated to this post; especially considering what Mozilla stands for.
Thanks for the reply to this and my other in this thread. Yes, "supposed" was intentional. :-) My point about Google's service offerings and Android was not to express a preference, just to point out why Google's Android had an edge in adoption. I'd rather use services that spy/track/advertise less, even if you still have to assume for prudence that all communications are logged and decryptable.
And for my other comment and your reply, I read on Glassdoor a lot of people inside Mozilla are unhappy with the current direction anyway, so agreeing with them could have been a plus, who knows. :-)
http://www.glassdoor.com/Revie...
"Con: "And if you work in Firefox OS expect no understanding of what's happening and when" in 3 reviews"
And: "Most of the org is in service to Firefox OS - this is necessary given the company's direction, but sucks resources from other projects." And: "They're now spending $100m/yr on developers. It's very hard to see what that's achieving. Seems as if top talent is wasting its time there compared to what's being achieved at Google, Apple and others. One reason is massive technical debt and an insane codebase."
To respond to your points on cost and underserved markets, it sounds like you know a lot about Mozilla. I won't disagree that their strategy is plausible. However, I've seen a similar approach not work our well for the OLPC as an entire new software ecosystem, so I remain skeptical. If even Microsoft can't succeed in the smart phone market, is Mozilla likely to?
Here were some comments I wrote about five years ago on the OLPC project as a software developer who participated in the Give-One-Get-One program (getting two and giving two): :-) Maybe someone should forward this note to someone they know at Google or Verizon? :-) Seriously, what US teacher would not buy a Droid over an iPhone knowing it was going to teach some poor kid to read in two years? (Of course, Apple might eventually have to follow suit. :-) And that gives me and the rest of the free software developer world two years to write all that free software for those kids. :-) "
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
"Imagine, Google and Verizon could even make a promise now to customers -- buy your Droid through Verizon, and in two years, if you continue your cell phone plan, we will give you the latest Droid version and if you return the old one to a Verizon store, we'll send it to materially poor kids loaded with educational software that teaches them how to read, write, and do math. And with bluetooth, and WiFi, the Droid could even have some software that works along the lines that Sugar aspired to do, with kids collaborating together. What a deal -- and it might greatly boost current sales.
As I suggest there, hand-me-down phones (perhaps with new batteries) may well be much cheaper than anything else for emerging markets. And those phones run Android plus some other OSes. I also think it unlikely Firefox will meet any special low-power goals or cost goals that Android phones would not meet. Most apps are not that performance critical so Java on Android is good enough, and Java will probably be more power efficient than JavaScript in Firefox OS. So where is the power savings or other costs savings really going to come from? I like ideas like "Design For The Other 90%", but it is still hard to beat a free Android phone given Moore's law and continued falling prices. The Kyocera Hydro is now US$30 on Amazon. It is better than probably any Android phone from 2009 when I wrote the above -- especially the G1 Android Phone I got as an Android developer which dies eight months later. In another couple years that same Hydro phone might be US$20 or less in the USA. And it would probably be already much cheaper now if purchas
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
And similar specs. The waterproof Kyocera Hydro is US$29.64 right now with free Prime shipping on Amazon for the Kyocera (carrier locked though, but WiFi works fine; unfortunately not sunlight readable though) versus US$99.00 (and free shipping) for the ZTE Open C. The Hydro is three times cheaper than the Firefox OS device. The ZTE Open C has slightly better hardware specs though and is not locked to a carrier given the SIM card slots.
http://www.amazon.com/Kyocera-...
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/...
So I guess I don't see where there are any cost of hardware advantages to this first offering with Firefox OS. Maybe there will be more to come? It's true you can only run that Kyocera on Boost Mobile, but WiFi works fine even without a plan. I don't know if that phone is carrier subsidized to any degree. I bought three Hydros (one a bit better) for developer testing for writing networked Android apps. I've paid for a few days of phone service for one of them mostly as a test; I have no plans on activating the other two as phones. I doubt those are subsidized much if at all, but I have no proof of that other than the fact than anyone can buy them and just use them as WiFi only devices.
I see multiple unlocked Android phones on Amazon for about US$100:
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sel...
Anyway, just thought more about your point on cost... Firefox OS is currently more expensive than low-end Android. So the (one billion Mozilla/Google US dollars later) question is, how fast will that change?
Even if Firefox OS was better than Android (still to be seen other than for privacy), it would still face the same uphill adoption of, say, FireWire/Thunderbolt vs. USB1/2/3.
Also for development/testing/networking purposes I bought a ~$120 Android OLPC XO tablet that comes pre-loaded with educational software:
http://www.amazon.com/XO-7-inc...
In a few years, those prices will continue to fall. It's much more pleasant to browse the web on that Android tablet than on an Android phone. I'm not convinced a Firefox OS tablet is going to beat that price anytime soon -- even if it might have privacy benefits.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://mobile.slashdot.org/sto...
That reference is to link this to a broader discussion. It's true the $30 Kyocera Hydro phone from Amazon is only for Boost Mobile -- but you don't need to activate it or sign a contract to buy it. If you use it as WiFi only, that is all you pay. One of the first apps we installed was a work in progress for disaster relief agencies and others called Serval Mesh which does direct phone-to-phone WiFi.
http://www.servalproject.org/
"Simply put, Serval is a telecommunications system comprised of at least two mobile phones that are able to work outside of regular mobile phone tower range due thanks to the Serval App and Serval Mesh. "
So, I think the low US$30 cost for the Hydro from Amazon shows what is possible. And that new Slashdot article sounds like an exploration of it. This is a broad trend related to Moore's law that I (and many others) have been talking about for years.
More by me on that from 2000:
"[unrev-II] Singularity in twenty to forty years?"
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
" Commtech -- Twenty years to ubiquitous cheap wireless communications
Source: This is already happening now with cell phones, but needs time to percolate throughout the world. "
Or more recently from 2008:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...
"Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg?"
I suggest in that one that the current cost of Princeton University hoarding its endowment is that it could have bought $100 OLPC-like computers for a couple hundred million poor families (assume five people each, for the bottom billion) in the world to give them access to education via the internet (like via Khan Academy). Or you could now buy Hydro phones for a the bottom billion families and pre-load them with WIkipeida. That shows how much the socio-economic landscape revolving around knowledge and privilege has changed given the playing out of Moore's law.
So, with or without Firefox OS, these trends are happening. What is frustrating about this is to see what is possible materially, but then see out socio-economic processes shaping that into something so much less than it could be (by increasing the rich-poor divide by always choosing the design that better supports central control with a gatekeeper who can monetize it). But that is also why it is so frustrating to see Mozilla with an idealistically better mission get a billion dollars recently and then so far have so little to show for it (other than a "me too" version of Android and WebOS) -- while also letting innovation in Thunderbird and Firefox seemingly grind to a halt.
As others have said, if you want to free Android users, you need to make a good suite of free apps and services, and even that is not enough because the phone carriers control the lowest layer of connection. Firefox OS by itself does not solve that problem. And it still leaves Android
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.