Slashdot Mirror
$33 Firefox Phone Launched In India
davidshenba writes Intex and Mozilla have launched Cloud FX, a smartphone powered by Mozilla's Firefox OS. The phone has a 1 GHz processor, 2 Megapixel camera, dual SIM, 3.5 inch capacitive touchscreen. Though the phone has limited features, initial reviews say that the build quality is good for the price range. With a price tag of $33 (2000 INR), and local languages support the new Firefox phone is hitting the Indian market of nearly 1 billion mobile users.
If I didn't already have a $300 smartphone, I'd snap one of these up in a heartbeat. It does make and receive phone calls, right? Amazing...
Umm... I guess this assuming that 80% of the people in India are smart phone users. That last i heard, smart phone usage in the USA was around 65%.
The average income in India is $1,500 USD/year vs the USA where it is $50,000 USD/year (roughly 33 times higher). $33 dollars doesn't sound like much to people in the USA, but that is 2.2% of the average Indian person's annual salary. That 2.2% number would be around $1100 outlay for the average American worker.
Perspective is everything when you try compare the consumer market between countries like the USA and India.
Much as I respect Mozilla as an organisation, even a quad core phone is worse at interpreting web-stack apps than byte-compiled or actual compiled code. I don't understand how lower processing power and higher processing requirements are going to solve anybody's problems.
Try to sell the Galaxy Nexus across India in volume and maybe you can tell us the answer :)
I noticed this comment had got a five early on...basing on assumptions that the big powerful USA has all the money its smartphone ownership percentage should be highest, I find this astonishing.
The link at the bottom is linked to(Slashdot will not accept a direct link) to Googles amazing tool where TNS have released their survey data on 54 countries and ownership of smartphones, and guess what USA is only the 19th country of percentage of smartphone ownership per person, drawing with Canada. India is already at 7%, and that is without phones dropping to $30; Google is targeting India with the Android One(A reference phone) at cheaper than Motorola E prices. India already has 7% smartphones that is 85.9 Million smartphone owners(Looks Like A billion mobile users realistic)...to put that in perspective the USA has only 148.5 Million.
Tomi provides unnecessary commentary to this data. The http://communities-dominate.bl...
The ignorance of American people on the world is astonishing.
You've missed the point of Firefox OS -- They win when other platforms allow their app packages.
Philosophically, not financially, of course.
Required reading for internet skeptics
July 2014: 9.78%
I don't like the posting of netmarketshare as gospel especially when they adjust their data, but quoting wikipedia as a measure is simply spinning figures in a "I don't even give a fuck about reality way" A quick look at statcounter shows firefox usage slightly down http://gs.statcounter.com/#bro... and at 18%. Netshare shows firefox slightly down at http://marketshare.hitslink.co... as 15%. Not a million miles from each other, but the trends basically show firefox usage is pretty flat. Even these figures are less of a reflection of how badly firefox is doing, but how well chrome is.
The last UX conference I was at we had a speaker that demonstrated that the next 1-2 billion "smart" phone users were coming from Africa and Asia where more modern devices didn't stand a chance in the majority of the market. From a cost per device point of view, sure, but more from the fact that we are creating first world apps, UIs and OSes that might not have anywhere near the traction they have here because of completely different needs. He saw an incredible opportunity there.
DaveyJJ
Don't be mental. Desktops are dying off, and Firefox with them. Once you adjust these stats to only show desktops, Firefox isn't dying at all.
So, given that their Android offering isn't seeing any uptake, like ALL non-stock Android browsers, where does that leave Mozilla? They can't compete on iOS or Windows - the former won't let them run their own browser, just a reskinned MobileSafari that's doomed to run slower than the built-in one, and the latter is a truly dying platform that ALSO won't let them freely run their own browser engine.
In other words, Mozilla is doing precisely what they should in order to keep their browser engine alive. I know you anti-Australis and anti-Chrome guys just can't fathom this, because you want to be right and want Firefox to do whatever will please YOU, but if that's the route they took then it would be doomed to die even faster. You're a niche of a niche these days.
So beg all you want, but Mozilla have their eyes on survival. If the best you can do is throw them under the bus because you dislike having to install a couple more addons to get your square tabs and complex UI back, then you really have no right to call their decisions stupid, nor are you contributing anything to the cause: you're just being selfish and myopic.
The goal is a single, standard, package that runs across all the major platforms.
That's a very good thing.
Required reading for internet skeptics
The Flame developer device is snappy enough but with way better specs.
Mozilla want to condemn the 'developing world' into using 128MB of RAM, which will obviously throttle performance.
I'd be curious to know how much half a gig would add to the price.
Can't wait to see how the market for chargers batteries and charge stations take off. There everyone is so use to 10 day standby.
This is why they are setup for imminent failure. The best selling mobiles in India are what the western world would call mid-range, like the Lenovo VIbe X.
And even then most are mid-range only in price and build-quality. Chipset-wise the Chinese phone-makers are bringing in some rather speedy models. And this already in a country that has 87% mobile penetration.
If they think that India is a market that will swallow up junk because it is so poor, or even if they think it is the 'developing world', they are delusionally out-of-touch.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Maybe 'condemn' is the wrong word, then.
But they're complicit in bowing to 'the whims of the actual device manufacturers'. The device may run in 128MB in its Tarako config but the phone won't deliver an optimal experience.
I'm just reflecting that I can't imagine the difference in price between 128 and 256MB modules would be that huge in 2014. Even the $25 Rpi model A shipped with 256MB back in 2012.
Would a $38 phone sell any worse if a 256MB module were $5 extra?
The indian market is 1 billion people, most in some state of poverty. You can "do well" there, by western standards, without touching more then a tiny fraction of it. Apple don't have 100% of the US population as a market, and don't have 100% of the market. In India, if both those things were true, it would only represent about 30% of the total population.
They could fix the bloat, bugs and crashes instead of trying to add new features that nobody wants (except maybe Chrome users, but they'd just use Chrome anyway).
As a Firefox user since way back when it was called Phoenix, all I really want is Phoenix 0.5 with complete and optimized support for modern HTML/CSS/etc.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
To be exact, the phone is without contract and Indian pre-paid mobile services costs around $2 a month for average users.
I fail to understand what you are saying. My point is that India is not a market for extremely low-end devices like the Intex shown here. In fact, Indians being too poor to own existing smartphones is a myth since it already has 87% penetration and most of those are mid-range smartphones as of today.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
It's a tad late but India has a poverty level of only about 20% roughly. The problem in India is actually that the gap between poor and rich is vast. Most Indians (esp. urban populations) can easily afford mid-range smartphones.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
A phone with 128mb of RAM running apps written in javascript on an ARM processor. Good luck with that.
Right: so still, think about those numbers. 30% of India's population is over 100% of the US in terms of sheer number of people. So a low-end phone is exactly the right device to target there.