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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!
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!
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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...
US thing... and it's not for emergency services, its for the NSA. :-p
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.