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Comment by robhawkes | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the comment, I really appreciate it!

To be clear, I'm not educated in business so my thoughts are my own (potentially naive) conclusions.

However, there are some very sound business decisions behind us chosing to go with Brazil first, and to go with cheaper, low-end devices. I'm sure they know what they're doing more than I do!

As an aside, we do have versions of Fx OS running on high-end devices and it runs amazingly well. It's not our market though (for now) so it's merely a cool "look what we could do with the power" moment.

I hope we succeed too.

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You are right to start with low-end devices:

Get it running brilliantly on cheap hardware. Don't waste anything. Make the OS efficient. Do things in the most direct way possible with a minimum of red tape. Expose the bare metal to Javascript. Put the bare minimum features in the OS and let open source grow around that.

I think out of everyone you've really hit the nail here. It's about starting a movement, and taking the platform in a direction it's been needing to go to for a long time. The collaborative nature of open source should grow around this project as soon as the product arrives, and I really hope it does.

Addendum: Don't fall into the Linux trap. Don't start off being "great on old hardware!" but eventually grow so huge as to need the same specs as modern Windows (my i7 laptop with 4 GB of RAM runs like crap, thanks Debian). Do things in a straightforward way, but in such a way that you can expand without tacking on loads of extra code.

Is Debian your problem, or GNOME?

My phone runs Linux, and it has 512MB RAM and a 1GHz ARM processor.

It's not GNOME, I haven't run GNOME on a day-to-day basis in over 7 years. Actually, I think it's probably Firefox that screws me as much as anything else.

Has to be said from experience that I'd never assume business people know what they are doing. Check it yourself.

Marketing isn't that complex. Unfortunately business people do tend to hide behind a facade of secrecy (often for good reasons -- you don't want to reveal your hand to your competitors because someone in your org leaks inside information). But that can also be used to hide poor / complete lack of analysis and bad decision making.

Its good to see you on here (I tend not to see authors of posts on HN - maybe its me)

Fantastic work - and if you dont mind answering dumb questions, what device would you recommend getting if I fancy playing (B2G_build_prerequisites has a list of a few - but I have no idea how to be sure I get specifc models, or if I can buy an Otoro in UK. Basically, really horrible starting questions :-)

Happy to be told just google harder

Cheers

Otoro is a prototype device not generally available. One of the listed models of Nexus S is your best bet right now. There may be something else in the near future, we're trying to firm up a target phone that is available for general purchase.

However, there are some very sound business decisions behind us chosing to go ... with cheaper, low-end devices. I'm sure they know what they're doing more than I do!

I'm not sure. Gecko is faster and lighter than Dalvik now? Since when?

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