It wasn't terrible, but it had a LOT of bizarre bugs and couldn't compete with even the cheapest Android (the kind that phone providers basically gave away for free at the time).
It was better than the old Nokia Symbian S40 device I had though.
I ended up moving to a super low end Android device that I got for free from a provider for porting my PAYG (prepaid) number to their service (also prepaid).
I also used one of the Nokia Windows phones for about a year as a student. It was good for calls and SMS, but fuck all else worked. Ended up lending that to someone who lost it.
Then the Microsoft-Nokia joke happened.
But, all of the phones I had used to crash pretty regularly, rock solid it was not! Still, I miss it!
And MeGoo was better then Windows Phone as well.
> Then the Microsoft-Nokia joke happened.
The real joke and borderline criminal act was for Nokia to adopt Windows when they had a much better open OS already.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS#Devices [2] https://www.kaiostech.com/explore/devices/
There are KaiOS devices that support VoLTE and work on US carriers, but the Banana doesn't seem to be one of them. In addition to its many other pain points. Those keys suck to hit...
Many EU carriers have planned to keep a small amount of 2G for industrial devices, old handsets, etc, but US carriers have not.
"The first major commercial adoption of B2G/Firefox OS was seen around 2018 with KaiOS, a widely popular commercial fork of Firefox OS that promised to be a modern OS for inexpensive feature phones. Although KaiOS turned out to be disappointingly closed and oriented to tracking users and shipping advertising, it was quickly forked in GerdaOS, a custom ROM that promised to bring back some of the openness of Firefox OS to KaiOS devices such as newer Nokias, and kill the intrusive user trackers in the process."
It felt, first and foremost, like a device built by someone who had been told stories about the phones of the first 5-8 years of the 2000s, but had never seen one, never used one, and wasn't quite sure how it was all supposed to really work. Lots of really weird pain points like predictive text not capitalizing the lone "i" no matter what mode I was in. I started trying to write texts without "I" in them to avoid having to perform the 72 keystroke sequence to capitalize it - I don't like being lazy in texts about things like that.
The performance wasn't bad initially, but it felt like there were some seriously non-optimal data structures involved in everything. A text thread with more than 50 messages or so started being slow to interact with, God help you if it's got more than a few pieces of media in it. And if the phone had too many text messages in general, the whole texting app would lag badly (seconds to open, seconds to see a list of conversations, etc). I had to very aggressively trim old threads, and sometimes even current ones, to try and keep the texting app responsive.
It also got oddly prone to "Oh, yeah! There was a thing I was supposed to notify you about! You're looking at me now, I remember, you got a text! chime" sorts of behaviors I could never run down the cause of. I'd be texting someone, waiting for a reply with the phone closed, and... nothing. Magically, as soon as I opened it 10 minutes later, I'd get the notification that they'd sent a text. I hate to say things like "You have one job," but "Notifying me that there's a phone call or text message" is sort of the core function of a modern phone-type device.
The browser was a joke. I could browse Hacker News and that was about it. Anything more complex would fail to render, or just crash the browser. A modern web capable device it was not.
I think I gave it a fair shake for a year. But I was still doing things like "Carrying an iPhone, powered down, for when I needed something I couldn't do on KaiOS." It was mostly either drone ops or a particular building access app that I needed often enough, so I don't really fault it, but it was annoying not having them on my carry device. Same goes for "literally anything but SMS." Attempts to get a Matrix client on the device didn't go very far (there is one, but it doesn't work very well), Signal was a no-go, and nothing else was useful either.
It did have Bluetooth, though. And I did like being able to cart around music on SD card. Don't carry too much, though, the music app couldn't handle a ton.
I moved to it when Apple decided to push on-device CSAM scanning, and... a year and another OS revision later, they've seemingly not done that. And then iOS 16 added Lockdown, which I decided to play with, determined did everything I wanted in such a feature, and I'm back to an iOS device with very few apps installed. I never had warm fuzzies about the security posture of the KaiOS ecosystem either - Apple, I do generally trust to try to secure their devices. KaiOS, nothing about it really felt robust against a remote attacker, though I've no evidence that it's actually full of holes. It just never gave any real confidence that it was more than a best effort, YOLO'd sort of thing tossed over the fence.
There were some fun little games, but they were all very peppered with advertising. At least you could sideload stuff.
Anyway... it's a thing, I tried it, and despite my exceedingly high tolerance for tech pain, I couldn't make it past a year. Failures on my part, I suppose. I could have probably dismantled it and repaired the keyboard...
That's the one thing that surprises me the most in your post. Any idea if it was actual browser engine issues, or running on inadequate hardware?
I believe the device has 512MB RAM and a quad core 1.1GHz A7 - so not exactly rocking the hardware. But the browser engine didn't have things like some basic Javascript support, near as I could tell - Discourse forums wouldn't load properly, grumbling about how I ought to enable Javascript. And on that little CPU and RAM, anything "faintly modern" just wouldn't work right at all.
Not that you can see much, it's a 240x320px screen.
There are some higher end KaiOS devices out there I debated, but spending a couple hundred on that level of functionality just didn't seem a good use of funds to me.
The problems I see with KaiOS are 1) lack of aggressive development to fix bugs/features, 2) lack of vendors upgrading the OS on new handsets, 3) lack of vendors upgrading the hardware to run newer versions of the OS. And the market doesn't really care (or have a choice), they just need the cheapest phone possible that can check the weather forecast or email.
Until both developers and vendors give a crap about building efficient technology, they will continue to churn out bloated, buggy software on cheap hardware. Even Palm Pilot was more advanced than the crap churned out today.
I would pay a lot of money for a Palm Pilot designed for 2022. The team that created Palms were gods.
iirc opera mini browser did something similar. The browser would tunnel all requests through their server and render and optimize the page before sending it back to the browser
Android does this in power save mode. Plug in a charger and all of a sudden you get notification pings as background tasks are given a chance to run.
My modern Android phone is like this now; it pretty much never capitalizes lone 'i's. In fact, the whole way auto-correct works is completely brain-dead; it's constantly trying to force me to use wrong words and wrong spellings, even when I try to back up and correct it. It's extremely frustrating. And judging by all the errors I see in other peoples' texts, it's not just me.
Honestly, it's been decades now. How hard can it be to make auto-correct not suck? There's so many utterly stupid things it does which should be fixable with a few lines of code. For one, how about not auto-correcting proper names (which you can tell because they're in the middle of a sentence and start with a capital)? And how about making a lone 'i' capital? And how about not auto-correcting at all if the user has backspaced over the auto-correction and fixed it?
Surely hyperbole and off by an order of magnitude...?
KaiOS is used on 160 million devices around the world.
Apple sell more iPhone than that in a single year.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the burden of proof is on the claimant (the parent comment) to provide it.
Until then, your claim is simply baseless and can be easily dismissed.
I can't imagine it working out for low-end mobile hardware.
My experience with Android always felt sluggish since then (given that I never buy expensive phones).
If there was ever anything that show how Silicon Valley and Tech, the modern meaning of "Software people" with little to zero understand of hardware and supply chain. This is it.
And Mozilla wasn't the only one, even Bill Gate said all hardware will eventually cost zero and be subsidised by running software and services.
The lack of understanding of hardware and Supply Chain, even after COVID and in 2022 still greatly baffles me.
One thing I really appreciated was that it was conceived as an appliance rather than as an attention grabber. We tolerate our phones being attention grabbers, but unrightfully so, it doesn't have to be this way. The default UI even had the saturation toned down, to not be so much in your face.
It was pretty capable for an 80 Euro phone. It was the only smartphone I owned that I could feel vibrate in my pocket. I concede that Android ran better on it, but it's not like FirefoxOS ran bad, on the contrary.
I unfortunately lost it, and it was about the time it was being discontinued. I would probably get another one. Heck, I would get one now, if they were still around.
Anecdote: friend had a KaiOS and it was pretty aweful.
I was at Mozfest in London and they gave everyone a phone, that was in 2014 or 15, so I would be surprised i nobody still had one kicking around.