Test-Driving a $35 Firefox OS Smartphone

An anonymous reader writes: Ars Technica got its hands on one of the extremely low-cost smart phones running Firefox OS. The Intex Cloud FX retails for about $35 in India, and its intent is to bring smartphones to people who traditionally can't afford them. So, what do you have to sacrifice to bring a smartphone's costs down that far? Well, it has a 3.5" 480x320 display, a 1Ghz A5 CPU, 128MB of RAM, and 256 MB of storage. (Those a megabytes.) There's no GPS, no notification LED, and not even 3G support. They say the build quality is as poor as you'd expect, and if you aren't at a 90 degree angle with the screen, colors are distorted. But, again: it's $35 — this is to be expected.

How well does the phone work? Well, the UI works well enough, but multitasking is rough. Everything's functional, but slow, sometimes taking several seconds to register touch input. The real killer, according to the article, is the on-screen keyboard, which is unbearable. The article concludes, "Sure, we're spoiled, "rich" people compared to the target market, but it's hard to believe that this is a "best attempt" at a cheap smartphone. ... The problem is that Firefox OS just isn't the right choice of operating system for this device—it's trying to do way too much with the limited hardware. It isn't configurable enough." They say the phone doesn't even make sense for a $35 budget.

Comments

So, how does it work as a phone?

[QuietLagoon]

They did a review of a smart phone yet do not mention how it works as a phone.

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Is voice quality OK when using it as a phone? Does it work well in weak signals?

Re:Why so slow?

[ArcadeMan]

And the "Retina" trend isn't helping either when a lot of Web devs are incredibly lazy or don't understand the consequences of their code.

A simple example is background images. On this website for example (wink-wink), the background is a 2012x1128 pixels JPEG with a file size of 1.6MB. So after downloading those 1624960 bytes, a CPU or GPU has to decompress that data into 2269536 pixels and it requires 6808608 bytes of RAM to store the result.

And all of that for a background image that look like it was converted into a 3-bit grayscale image before being saved in JPEG, which is usually the wrong format for such a low number of colours. Even Photoshop, which creates bloated PNGs in the first place, can save that 3-bit grayscale image (8 colours) as a 327KB PNG (326646 bytes). That's 4.97 times smaller than the JPEG file while preserving the pixelated look 100% better than JPEG which will need a really high quality setting for the same result. Hell, ImageOptim can optimize that file down to 294338 bytes, almost 10% savings on the PNG, meaning my PNG version is now 5.52 times smaller than the JPEG. And because of the Photoshop color-reducing conversion, I've even removed the JPEG artifacts and restored the pixels to their true 3-bit value.

So not only does the author does not understand the impact of such a huge background image for the CPU/GPU and the RAM, he doesn't know when to use the proper image format. Probably someone who learned that "JPEG can compress images better than anything else, one-size-fits-all".

And why is the background image that big in the first place? Because of 27" monitors? It's not a content image, it's a background image. He could have used a much lower resolution and used "background-size: cover". Even if it blurs the image a bit, it's not important since it's only for the background.