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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."
company phone & personal phone?
Because there exist places where data plans are expensive and voice plans are selectively cheap. Say you regularly call people on two different carriers, both of which offer cheap plans with a "free minutes for calls between our customers" feature. Or you found one carrier with cheap data, but want to make your voice calls on another...
Basically it's for those messy markets with some actual competition. So, not North America.
One very simple use case is to have one personal number and one work/professional number. If in a country that has cheap voice plans (and free SMS), especially if it's no longer cheap only when calling within a network, then you can have them both for less than a single plan would cost in the US.
If you can afford a data plan, you can have one I suppose without needing two of them.
If you live near a border or otherwise cross one often, that's another case where it makes sense to have two SIMs. Else you would need two phones or remove battery and swap SIM every time.
Mod parent up
Having lived in an emerging market (Romania) for six years, I knew several people who would carry around multiple feature phones, or a smartphone and a feature phone, just so they could use prepaid SIM cards from two different networks, so they could call all of their friends and family "in network".
I was using a prepaid SIM from Orange, and for 5 Euros/month, I had 3000 minutes/month to other Orange numbers and 100 minutes/month to other networks/landlines. As it happens, everyone I wanted to call was on Orange, so I was fine. However, I knew people who would pay 5 Euros/month to Orange, and another 5 Euros/month to Cosmote. For 10 Euros/month, they had effectively unlimited calling to everyone they wanted to call, but needed to carry a second phone (or swap SIMs to call on the correct network).
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.
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.
Indeed, or one for each country... Especially when travelling around in Europe... Or living in the US, but still have a Danish phone number and simcard I want to maintain :)
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).
Sheesh...and they say cell phone service in the US is bad. Granted I pay more, but with t-mobile, $22 a month lets me call anywhere in the US from anywhere in the US with zero restrictions. I also have unlimited data and texts from anywhere to anywhere in the world (well...anywhere except from cruise ships and a small number of backwater countries I'd never see myself either going to or calling anyways, which is mainly a symptom of these particular areas charging their own embargoes to EVERYBODY, including the locals.)
Add $10 a month and I can make voice calls to some 70+ odd countries unlimited.
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?
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.
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.