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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.
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.
With amazing reviews like this Android better watch out.
"The real killer, according to the article, is the on-screen keyboard" - Best OSK Ever
"Everything's functional" - This is a real smartphone
"Rich people compared to the target market" - Rich people wish they had it
"best attempt at a cheap smartphone" - it's the best cheap smartphone desired by rich people
"the right choice of operating system for this device—it's trying to do way too much" - It does so much the average user probably can't handle it
Can't wait to preorder!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I remember running WinXPe, on a 600mhz amd, that only had 128meg ram, and did have a 9gig HD, but the OS only took up under 200meg.
Boots up with less than 61meg usage, better than any smart phone today.
All it needs is a full screen DX based simple interface based on rendered shapes, no textures.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
When it comes to horrible phones like this Firefox phone or the ones Microsoft makes, wouldn't you rather just have a feature phone?
At it would be easy to dial and text with, be reliable and have crazy long battery life.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
.
Is voice quality OK when using it as a phone? Does it work well in weak signals?
But then, the first iPhone wasn't 3G either...
My first thought upon reading the Ars piece was "why not get a Symbian Nokia? I have one in my pocket right now and with Opera Mini it does the job better than this thing"; the Ars readership seems to concur. There's also mention of a $48 (maybe $60 if the import duties are huge) Lumia 520 and a dozen other workable devices.
The bottom line: shoehorn your pet OS with HTML5 framework in ultracheap hardware, and everybody loses.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
I do not know about the supper low end phones that Nokiasoft are making but I did get the 635 as temp phone while I am waiting for the new Nexus.
Guess what? For $129 off contract it is a very good phone.
I have LTE, very good battery life, and Windows Phone does not suck.
What I dislike is.
No Google Hangouts app.
No runkeeper app
No flash for the camera
The Bluetooth does not work with the cheap bluetooth adaptor I got for my car which works fine for my old android phone, my wifes S3, my Nexus 7, and my wifes iPad.
Part of it might be the fact that I got the phone to leave Sprint because I had terrible service in my very large town in south florida. I am talking speeds of well under 0.1 m a second at locations on US-1 near the mall, and I-95 near a major shopping area.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
There's no GPS
How is that even legal? I thought countries required phone makers to include GPS for enhanced emergency services. Or is that exclusively a U.S. thing?
It doesn't have a GPS. Doesn't that mean it's not legal in the USA? I thought that was required for all phones so that if you call 911, the dispatcher will know where you are. I also thought that the GPS was integrated into the chipsets that they have to use for other basic features anyway.
$35 is not a great deal for a phone. Granted, it is cheap. But you can get Chinese smart phones for around $100. Phones just as good as flagship phones for $200. $35 isn't even a good price point for those in poverty. And no GPS? That's just a deal breaker right there. No 3G and no Led is not big deal at all... not even worth mentioning.
Give it a couple more years and you'll be buying smart phones out of vending machines.
wouldn't you rather just have a feature phone?
Just because YOU would, don't assume EVERYONE would.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
That's plenty of hardware. Hell, my first color laptop was less machine than that is. Someone just needs to rip the bloated goat of software they've put on there. I bet it'd be pretty damn snappy with a text-mode UI and a bare-bones Linux kernel.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It's 35 bucks. Or 1/20th of an iPhone.
It's made for the Indian market, rather than the country with household debt of $11.65 Trillion.
That's why I'm glad the review honed in on the problems with keyboard/input. Waiting around for 10 seconds is fine if your only other option is not seeing content at all. But if typing isn't even remotely accurate, I can see the frustration setting in pretty quickly.
Not as a main phone, hell no. But there are times when I might not want to carry my expensive, fragile phone - going to a metal show, or a bad neighborhood, or whatever.
For that, being able to pop my SIM out of my Nexus 5 into something literally a tenth the price would save a lot of hassle and cash if it gets broken or stolen, and as long as it can still make calls and texts, it will work for most purposes. There isn't a single app I rely on, even email, but I do rely on being able to make phone calls and send texts. I briefly looked into buying a second-hand phone to see if it was cheaper, and it still can't beat the price of $35.
That said, who the hell said "let's make a dirt-cheap phone OS so the entire planet can enjoy the web!" and then decided to do everything in HTML and Javascript? Even Android is better than that. That's one of the areas where you would really want the speed and efficiency of a low-level language.
No runkeeper app
Did you try Runtastic?
RT.
I do not know about the supper low end phones that Nokiasoft are making but I did get the 635 as temp phone while I am waiting for the new Nexus.
Guess what? For $129 off contract it is a very good phone.
I guess it is.
Take this simple math: $129/$35=3.6
Now compare that $35 phone to an $600 iPhone because that's the relative price if you have a 20 times lower salary. Then think about this: will you buy a 3.6x$600 = $2200 phone? I would not. So that $35 dollar phone is what they can pay. That extra $100 is for food, clothes and living in general.
No but I am not a big time runner. I just used it to keep track of my steps and frankly this phone has a built in app that does that also.
If I could get all the Google Apps and the bluetooth got fixed I would be tempted to keep this phone. I really like the Google ecosystem and will probably stay with it.
Now if I was just getting a smartphone and wanted cheap and LTE I can not think of a better value than the 635 right now
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I remember running Amiga Workbench on a 7mhz motorola, that only had 1meg ram and did not have a HD, but the OS only took up under 1meg.
I remember running CP/M on a Intertec Superbrain with a 4Mhz Z80, that only had 64KB and two 180KB floppies. The OS plus a complete Office suite fitted on one of those floppies...
FFOS is a good mobile OS. I have tried version 2.0 in a ZTE Open and although this is also a crappy phone (single core CPU, 256 MiB RAM), it is not as crappy as the Cloud FS. The keyboard works well, and the OS runs rock solid (no hangs, decent speed). The only problems with this phone are the crappy camera (slightly better than the one in the Cloud FX) and the poor multitasking due to the low RAM amount. If you install FFOS e.g. on a Nexus device, you will find it performs great and it has no multitasking problems. I like FFOS and I've been considering switching from Android to FFOS, the only things I'm missing right now is a good SSH client that works "offline" (e.g. not connecting to a web page through the Internet) and a swype-like keyboard. About these extremely low spec smartphones, I think something like the almost dead Symbian would make a lot more sense. I owned a Nokia 5800 some time ago, with the same amount of RAM (128 MiB) and a weaker CPU, and it performed pretty decent. 128 MiB is just too low for a full featured mobile OS like FFOS.
Anything Firefoxy is surely bloated... I think you can't compile and link Firefox 32bit natively anymore because the linker needs more than 4Gigs...
But why is it so slow?
It only has 128MB of RAM. It ought to be blazing fast if anyone these days was willing to develop with resource constraints like these in mind. PCs in the 80's has responsive GUIs while running < 10MHz.You could still use Linux as the kernel but the bloat and overhead from the non-native code in the front end kills performance.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Applications specifically designed on the assumption that the user has a broadband connection are going to suck; but I certainly remember valuing (rather highly) having a computer powerful enough for web browsing even when I only had a 28.8 modem on a fairly noisy POTS line that often dragged it below its nominal best. People slightly older, or slightly more aggressive as early adopters, would likely say the same about even more feeble connections right back to the days of acoustic couplers.
This particular phone sounds like it has real issues implementing the 'smart' side of 'smartphone'; but you really don't need much bandwidth to make the additional power of a networked computer valuable.
Amiga stuff and friends were made in assembly, C or even BASIC for the slow stuff, with no memory protection, no safety and no networking. Dumbphone firmware would be the boring, shitty equivalent - someone needs to build sprite hardware and nice games into dumbphones, but then again the keypads only register one key at a time.
But here we have a "smartphone" so it needs to execute random shit javascript code from the internet. No way around it, unless you can convince people they want an equivalent of Lynx with pictures. So, many sites you can't login to, webmails you can't read, no youtube for you etc.
It's extraordinary resource hungry and that's why Firefox OS dedicates all resources (even "ROM" space) to it.
And to make thing worse CPU-wise the RAM is compressed like the hard drive in bad old Doublespace days.
Tech moves fast.
In two years this sort of phone will be on par with mine, an HTC Desire HD. It's 3.5 years old and does all I could ever want from a Phone. Appart from being a little sluggish at times maybe. But that's hardly an issue, given that it is very sturdy and has a replaceable battery - which most modern phones don't.
When robots have advanced far enough into manufacturing, we'll have the equivalent of iPhone 6es come out of vending machines and the likes, for prices simular to that of this model. The predecessor to my current phone was a Blackberry Curve 8310. The superiour keyboard and battery runtime aside, the entire device seems way outdated and strangely anachronistic to me, like from a different era - and it's only 7 years old!
It's actually quite realistic when Google claims that they want to put the second half of humanity on to the internet within the next 5 years.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
There are plenty of low-cost unlocked smartphones. For about $50, you can get a new Android phone with similar specs and GPS, and you get a heck of a lot more software for it.
I think any OS that could run somewhat bearable on Openmoko Neo Freerunner would be a great fit for such cheap phones.
You are correct. I was repeating something that I had heard many times, but turns out not to be true.
Here, I Googled it for me:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/...
A lot of the concerns are legitimate and likely due to needing 2x-4x the RAM to function properly. But a notification LED? Why the fuck would I want that? I don't even have one on a desktop or laptop. No comment on GPS (law enforcement and drone strikes may use GSM triangulation anyway). Lack of multitouch and prediction on the keyboard? like I would want to hit different keys at once and want my keyboard to wipe my ass for me? (also in such place as India I guess they still have dozens languages). The camera shots? exponentially better than my dumbphone. Losing time? If I remove the CR2032 on my desktop or battery on my phone, I lose time. Just don't remove your fucking battery. No storage? add 32GB SD and it beats iphone 6.
Multitasking? not really needed. But sadly the phone kind of fails at single tasking. (and music or FM playback should be "almost multitasking" that works).
That's said it's a failure ; someone needs to invent micro-DIMM DRAM I guess (not that it would make much sense, though). Same lesson as on a desktop computer : 512MB is usable (yes even today, latest linux+lxde+firefox), 256MB you're pushing it, 128MB it's slideshows and you're pretending stuff works but only really good for music playback, video playback, text editor and minesweeper.
Seven years ago.
It would be quite acceptable fast at loading 1998 webpages I think. The problem is that our demands for our web browsers have gone up. Javascript is remarkably memory hungry, and its performance suffers enormously when memory constrained. Also, FirefoxOS was never intended for a device this constrained, unlike early iOS or Android versions that were built from the ground up to get decent performance on this kind of hardware. Some of the problems sound like straight up bugs too, like the horrendous camera performance. 2MP is absolutely enough to get a decent picture that doesn't look like some abstract painting. That's an encoder error on the phone, and if it had support (it's $35 so probably not) it's something that could be fixed with a firmware patch I'd bet.
I read the internet for the articles.
OpenSignal isn't a very reliable source of information on coverage as it's based (at least in part) on crowd-sourced data. If people in an area are not using the app and contributing data, an area will show no coverage.
It's quite likely that the more rural an area is in India (or the United States), the less likely it is that someone will be using OpenSignal's app in a given location for several reasons. First, there are just less people per square km each day - so a 1% market penetration for the app is more likely to leave areas without data. Second, rural areas tend to be less affluent and therefore less likely to have phones that have room for lots of apps and/or subscribers who are willing to spend money for bandwidth for the app. Finally, I wager (admittedly based on my experience in the US) that urban areas have, on the average, a larger percentage of people who are techncally savvy and likely to have even heard of OpenSignal.
I live in one of the world's tech centers with very good cell coverage. However, the heat maps would lead you to believe in many areas that the only coverage is along freeways and arterial streets and there is none on secondary (typically residential) streets. I know this is completely untrue and I assume it reflects that thousands or tens of thousands of people a day use each freeway and arterial streets and drive a significant percentage of their miles on such streets so if a small percentage of the people run the app, one of them will end up using the major streets every so often and providing data. On the other hand, in a quiet residential neighborhood, that same penetration of users would likely show many/most blocks w/o coverage because these streets have so few "passenger miles" per year.
As well, there are large greenspace areas w/hiking trails around where I know there is coverage and there's absolutely NO hint of that shown via OpenSignal - again, low usage by people with their phones on and running the app probably is the cause.
Maybe you can trust OpenSignal where they claim there is coverage, but it's pretty unreliable for showing where there isn't coverage. (This gives me some ideas for a better app - but I won't share that here!)
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
See also: Nexus 5.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Alright, I did a lazy and inaccurate description. I think it's about right if I say it's swapping to a compressed ramdisk (whose size maybe is dynamic but I don't know)
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.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I have a ZTE Open C and while I'd say Forefox OS 1.3 is not yet ready for prime time the basics work. I believe 2.0 will be a significant step up. I picked this phone up to use while my Galaxy Nexus was repaired. Worked fine for basic stuff. Phone, maps, websbrowsing.
Maybe the reviewr has too high expectations for this level of phone.
I remember running OS-9 on a Color Computer 2 with a 0.895 MHz 6809E, that only had 64KB and only one floppy.
I can't wait to see the next reply.
Anything that doesn't run on valves is dangerously cutting edge to some people...
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Mod this Flame bait!
I used to support 12 users on a PDP11 wit 1MB of RAM (4 disk drives and two tape drives). Also no G's, nor GPS but not much chance of it moving anywhere - it filled an 18 ton truck, and used 415V at 20A, (provided you spun up the disks one at a time).
The spec of this phone is way better than the original IBM PC, and the build quality is probably better than a lot of the original clones. But it would be better to buy a second hand phone if you are spending under $100. You can by a Samsung Galaxy S2 for that. (A PDP11 would probably cost more, but it might also be more fun).
Meanwhile, my Samsung Note 3 does not even support tape drives! No scsi port, and no drivers for my USB DAT drives. I am still waiting for MT-ST to be ported to Android. Shame.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I only made it about 3/4 of the way through the first page. I clicked expecting an article about a phone. Maybe I would even get to see just what Firefox OS looks like, what features it has, what it does. Instead I found a not-very well done article about the digital divide. Maybe it gets better farther on? I don't know. I lost interest.
is the on-screen keyboard, which is unbearable.
So it's like the keyboard on an iPhone?
Typing on an iPhone is like being in a pile of naked people in a dark room. You know you're touching something, you're just not sure what.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Amiga stuff and friends were made in assembly, C or even BASIC for the slow stuff, with no memory protection, no safety and no networking. Dumbphone firmware would be the boring, shitty equivalent...
In my experience, modern "dumbphones" are as bad or worse than smartphones in terms of the speed of their interfaces. (My understanding is that they're written mostly in Java, which is a bizarre choice given the hardware constraints.) If you have had the misfortune to use one, it's obvious that the designers and programmers never actually use these phones.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Try running Android with 128 MiB and you'll be glad if it ever boots. I have an Android tablet with a Tegra 2 CPU (dual core 1.2 GHz) and 512 MiB RAM Running Cyanogenmod 10.1 (Android 4.2.2 IIRC) and it runs painfully slow. Of course I don't think iOS would be able to run properly with these specs. FFOS does a great job squeezing poor hardware, but it cannot do miracles.
In a couple of years, you're going to be able to buy hardware with x4 the specs of what this phone has for less than $50.00 and it'll be able to run an older version of android decently. If you look at China it's starting to happen now although not yet in bulk supply.
"It's good enough for poor people" is very condensing. Just because they have no money, it doesn't mean they'll be happy to use an unusable phone. They're better off with a feature phone until hardware prices drop.
Not seen that problem on Samsung, Nokia and Wiko dumbphones (though I didn't try the very latest Nokia).
By dumbphones, those are those that don't come with a browser - but the phone may have microSD, bluetooth, FM radio, microUSB, white LED and even what I call a webcam.
this.
More browser control is needed (block ads, block scripts, disable images..)
The poor phone maybe does well on wikipedia, which is uncluttered and has a Web 1.0 GUI. Meanwhile, some big sites out there are so ridiculously heavy that I don't like/don't want to load them even on a desktop.
Re-decoding and re-drawing the image everytime would be very sensible, if it's hardware accelerated - even at every screen refresh. Graphics cards have been doing that since 1999/2000 in games by supporting compressed textures - S3TC and such - which I guess even the phone's poor GPU support.
Newest GPUs support newer texture compression formats, and there's even a new real time compression standard intended to compress the stream between a GPU/SoC/whatever and a display (to reduce power consumed by the transmission or e.g. to allow 8K on Displayport 1.3)
Ideally the JPEG/PNG picture would be decompressed (a dedicated hardware block or image processing DSP might assist. Cell phone SoC do have such stuff), re-compressed by dedicated hardware (and maybe resized) into the latest and greatest texture compression format, then the browser uses the GPU to compose the web page's display.
GPS is a RECEIVER UNIT ONLY. Unless your phone keeps GPS always on and transmits your GPS location via wireless or mobile connection, GPS is useless for tracking.
And government, your network provider and emergency services can track your phone just fine without GPS by using triangulation and comparing signal strengths from several mobile towers surrounding you.
--Coder
If you need open, Linux-based and hackable, try getting a Jolla. http://jolla.com/
It is not available in US yet, and it's a bit pricy, but it's being developed at a good pace, and I hope it will get there. I'll get one when I retire my current phone, just because Google is closing up Android more and more with each release.
I wonder how Jolla would cope with low-end hardware like in this 35$ phone. It's supposedly faster than recent Androids on same hardware, not sure how low can you go though.
--Coder
I understand, but the biggest problem in my view is not running slow, it is expected in a limited hardware. What bothered me on the test was how Firefox OS dealt with this limited hardware, failing to perform basic activities when it should be executing then (even if slowly).
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time