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Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla announced today at its developer event in Orlando that the company is ending its smartphone experiment. Mozilla will stop developing and selling Firefox OS smartphones. Ari Jaaksi, Mozilla's SVP of Connected Devices, said, "We are proud of the benefits Firefox OS added to the Web platform and will continue to experiment with the user experience across connected devices." However, he added that it didn't end up providing a great user experience, so they decided to move their efforts elsewhere within the "connected devices" ecosystem. The TechCrunch article notes, "Mozilla has been on a streamlining track lately. Last week it announced that it would be looking for alternative homes for its Thunderbird email and chat client. The aim is for the company to focus more on its strongest and core products and reputation."
Another iPhone killer has died.
A race to the bottom is a race to the grave.
A variety of reasons.
The latest Nexus phones by Huawei and LG have priced themselves out of the market, for those of us not willing to spend $500+ on bling. Particularly brutal with the current $AU exchange rate. I'd consider buying a 2nd hand Nexus 4 if only it had a user-replaceable battery to extend its life by another couple of years but no.
So then you're in the land of vendor crapware, Chinese spyware (if purchased online) or carrier bloatware. So the solution then is flashing your device with an unofficial cyanogenmod port if it's not one of their 'blessed' models that still receives updates. That is if your handset vendor doesn't boobytrap its bootloader (Moto) or if your arch is still supported (armv6). Which all things being equal, you might find most things work smoothly except the video record feature is borked.
That's been my experience, anyway... Oh and I can't stand Chrome the mobile web browser, so I'd just be installing Firefox anyway, which was the motivation for running Mozilla's own OS...
Maybe things have changed in Android land but twice bitten thrice shy.
Windows Phone is a great unknown but I think Continuum is worth exploring since I have a spare LCD monitor, keyboard and mouse and for much casual computing use (e.g. my university studies in humanities), all I need is a web browser and MS Office. (And yes i have several x86 machines on the desk here booting Windows and Linux for specialist tasks, so it's not like I don't appreciate 'real' software)