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Comment by Syonyk | Hacker News Reader

Both, far as I could tell.

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.

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Can confirm, both. KaiOS has tons of bugs and vendors usually ship old buggy versions. But the hardware itself often dies or has flaws, because it's the cheapest phone you can make with modern features (bluetooth, wifi, 4G LTE, a multitasking OS that can "run apps", etc).

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.

> 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.

Palm didn't have a fully-featured browser but pre-rendered pages server-side (that solution was called "Access" I believe). Palm had nowhere near the power, emulating Thumb/68k instructions on a handheld. FirefoxOS was on to something, and even WASM could maybe provide apps without an app store, but with the incredible web bloat of the last decade we got neither lean nor portable web apps.

>Palm didn't have a fully-featured browser but pre-rendered pages server-side

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

That's unfortunate, if no less confusing. Any chance this happened before https://techweez.com/2020/03/11/mozilla-will-support-kaios-i... ? I'm just trying to square the statement that it has a fundamentally broken browser engine with the claim that it's still being supported directly by Mozilla. (Not, to be clear, that I doubt you for a moment.) I wonder if they did something like intentionally disabling features (say, JS) in order to make it fit on the hardware. I mean, ultimately kind of whatever, because I'm hardly going to use a proprietary stack like that anyways, but it's puzzling that browsing is the weak point on a Firefox OS fork.

Not sure. It was a Flip IV I ran from about Aug 2021 to Aug 2022, on KaiOS 2.something.

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