Firefox OS puts a good $50 smartphone within reach | Hacker News Reader

Firefox OS puts a good $50 smartphone within reach

zdnet.com

84 pointscpeterso35 comments

I have a feeling Firefox OS is going to be big. from what I've seen of YouTube demos the OS is quite responsive on modest hardware (gs2 and nexus s).

I've had no luck this week trying to build the OS for a gs2. I'm hopeful that I'll have more success compiling for a nexus s.

Yes, I think so too. There was a big gap left open when WebOS was mercilessly killed off by HP, and I really wanted to see WebOS succeed.

Firefox OS is great so far, it has its quirks but its still very early days. There is no question in my mind that it will be a serious contender. There are so many devs out there who just want to code for one platform (web) and cant be bothered to go native (ask anyone using phonegap or sencha)...so a giant influx of good apps is not far off. And best of all, its built to open standards with no walled garden.

Actually not one went native after trying out phonegap. It would be interesting if you could elaborate more about the reasons for "giant influx of good apps". Not coding for one platform cannot be a reasonf for that, even the opposite. Cross-platform apps are usually aliens on all supported platforms. Open standards and no walled garden do not imply the quality in any way. For infrascturcure things, sure. For apps… I cannot come up with one example where open source (desktop) app is better than commercial alternative.

Whether the driving force is Firefox OS, Android, Windows, hardware components or a combination of everything, I am hopeful about the idea of a good $50 smartphone.

I had a conversation with someone about a year ago that made an impact on me. In terms of penetrating down the income ladder to those with the lowest income in the least developed places, mobile phones may have gone farther than anything else. Basic technology like electricity, cars/buses/trains, plumbing, sewage, roads.. These things penetrate down to the lowest 20-30 percentiles or so. Very few things make it farther down.

Mobile phones, made it farther down the income ladder in ten years than some technologies have regardless in thousands of ears. Around 95, mobile phones were for wall street yuppies. By 2005 subsistence farmers in failed states have access to them.

Smartphones tablets are similar enough to follow the same path path. Mobile phones shave had a big effect on the worlds poorest. Think of what access to the internet could do.

Interesting, I think I'm interrested in getting one of these devices [1]. I'm wondering though if there are currently the only (preview) devices supporting Firefox OS? And if there are officially supported by Mozilla and will continue to officialy receive software updates in the near future? (I don't want to buy a device useless in 4 months).

[1] http://www.geeksphone.com/

I bought a keon when the shop first opened and received it last week. Since I've had it, I was able to update the OS on the phone itself. I didn't even need to plug it into a PC. It was slick.

Ah Great to know, I'm really tempted by the Keon.

[edit] I decided to buy it, but they seem to not have many stocks, it's currently out of stock for both models.

Mozilla has a list of supported devices (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox_OS/...), with the geeksphone devices being in Tier 1 support, and a couple of Android phones in Tier 2/3.

Thanks for the link it's very helpful.

The next update is planned to be released on 1st of May.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G/Schedule_Roadmap

I'm more interested in what this will do for mobile app development than the actual phone itself. Having a phone that anyone with a text editor can write software for is going to be huge.

I briefly played with a FirefoxOS Phone at Linuxfest Northwest and it was more responsive than my old Motorola X2. I ran a few of the pre-installed apps and took a picture with the camera and it worked as expected.

I am really looking forward to the impact that Firefox OS is going to have in the mobile market. There is definitely still space for a highly-featured low-priced smartphone and the HTML only is a plus for those not willing to put the time in learning how to program for Android or iOS, giving it a small edge apps-wise.

Interesting, and I'm hopeful. Though I'm not so sure about what he's saying about Android phones from China. I've bought some cheap Chinese 'smartphones' before and they were unusably bad. Perhaps there are better, Android based, models around nowadays.

What did you buy? And from where?

Just looked at dx.com and they have a lot.. but not too many with android 4

I bought a few iPhone clones, dual sim, basic java app support. This was before Android really took off, hence why I'm curious.

We'll see how "good" it is. I'm very skeptical about a Javascript-heavy OS being as good as an Android one on the same hardware. If all things are equal, it shouldn't be. However, I suppose Firefox OS will be more "feature-free" in the beginning, and those HTML5 apps will be a lot simpler than the typical native app, and these two things might compensate for the slower speed of Javascript. We'll see.

Well, Dalvik is not a speed deamon. I don't have any benchmarks on actual phone hardware available, but I can guess that javascript code will not run much slower on phone hardware than on desktop comparable desktop browsers, while Dalvik is a waaay slover than regular Java code on desktop.

If going by the stats that Xamarin gave[1] for Dalvik versus Mono on Android 4.0, Dalvik is also much slower than Mono. Though obviously Xamarin is not the most independent source in the findings, but I would believe it to outperform Dalvik in my own uses of both it and Dalvik for Android apps (I bought a license for it 6 months ago).

There's also some results by Koush Dutta[1] (Cyanogenmod contributer and Clockwork Recovery developer) from 2009 showing similar findings, though obviously that's way old and before Dalvik had JIT added in Android 2.2. We had a discussion sometime ago about that article on hn as well[3]

[1] http://blog.xamarin.com/android-in-c-sharp/

[2] http://www.koushikdutta.com/2009/01/dalvik-vs-mono.html

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=421862

Dalvik does have a JIT now, and it's much easier to JIT Java in the first place. The difference between deskop and mobile may be smaller with JavaScript, but not by much.

The biggest issue JavaScript+HTML has is memory usage. Cheap phones don't have much memory and Java on Dalvik is much more memory efficient.

you are mistaken, firefox os does not need "the same hardware" as android, it needs less, a lot less.

I have Firefox OS running on a device that was originally intended for Android, and I can tell you that it runs very fast. As it should- the target for Firefox OS devices is considerably lower.

In any case, the language being used on the OS has next to no bearing on the actual performance. How can you know that JavaScript is slower than Java? The devil is in the details- i.e., the implementation.

The alternative seems to be Ubuntu OS for phones.

It'll be interesting to see how these "alternative" OSes perform in developing countries -- namely, those in Africa. I'm just glad to see the GPL being able to help harbor an emerging product without shooting themselves in the foot. They're providing third party compatibility, while still trying to tackle a completely different market. It's quite wonderful to see.

its MPL. not that GPL crap

where does it say that the phone will retail for $50? The author implies it and refers to the phone as though he was actually able to obtain one for about $50..

I tried one of these phones last week. It was awful. No innovation, slow/juddery animations, bad UX. Granted it's a developer preview, but based on the preview I wouldn't develop for it.

The preview is supposed to give you an idea of how it will function on real world low-end devices, so sounds like that's working, at least. :)

How does it compare to the $100 retail iPhones and Android phones you've used?

Even if you buy a cheap plane ticket from Ryanair, you’re allowed to complain if only one of the two engines work.

He may have been asking a genuine question. Given the current thread is about how much you can do for very little money, comparing how a $100 Firefox OS device to a $100 Android one is perfectly valid (though not entirely fair as one of the two is still not officially production ready).

I don’t see how it could be anything but snark, as there are no unsubsidized $100 iPhones.

Fair enough, I somehow completely missed the significance of iPhone in the sentence and took it as smartphones in general (of which all the cheap ones are either Android or not-quite-as-smart-phones running something older).

But the cheap Firefox OS device to cheap Android device is still a valid comparison that I for one would be interested to see played out.

True - but if you buy a ticket on a jetliner with only one engine working (and it says it on the box), people might be curious as to how it compares to the other airlines that also sell tickets on one engine jets…

No, they wouldn’t be curious. No sane person wants to be in a plane crash. Nobody ever says ‘Best plane crash ever, 10 out of 10, would fly again’.

Both phones are out of stock in the online shop.

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