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Comment by ido | Hacker News Reader

I've used firefox-os (the developer release phone) & I honestly don't see any significant improvement over ios or android.

It mostly felt like a much slower version of android tbh.

I would wager that your shitty experience is due to under-powered phone with old 2.x os. A high end device with up do date 4.x would be much more pleasurable to use.

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I have a Samsung GT-S5830i. I don't have a lot of additional apps installed - maybe two games and a Twitter profile manager. It, generally, feels sluggish when switching between applications, such as messaging to web browsing.

My new Geeksphone Keon with FirefoxOS feels much more responsive than the Samsung with Android. And the Firefox browser works much better on the Keon!

Unfortunately, a couple of functionality things with the Keon prevent me from migrating across - as far as I can see contacts can only be imported from Facebook or a SIM card. Also email only supports some webmail options (e.g. Gmail) and IMAP, no POP3 or Exchange server support. I'm not complaining though, as I know it's a developer release. I'm just hopeful someone with better skills than me will enhance the relevant applications.

With respect to this Jolla article, I'm unimpressed the phone is priced so high. My initially gut feel when I saw the article was "damn, I just got this FirefoxOS phone." After reading that the price point for Jolla is EUR399, I'm pretty happy with my EUR125 Keon purchase.

> as far as I can see contacts can only be imported from Facebook or a SIM card

Did you update FxOS after you bought the phone? There is a new "Importer" app which sync'ed contacts from Google/Gmail. Works well.

Thanks, and I haven't looked at contacts again since the update. I appreciate you pointing this out to me. I will have another look at contacts this evening.

You are comparing a phone with 256MB RAM (The samsung) to a phone with 512MB RAM (the Geeksphone). It is unsuprising the Keon is faster and snappier!

I have a Samsung Android-phone of the same era. Very slow with the stock rom, but quite good to use with a custom one (and profits a lot from using opera mini). The androidcentral-community around your phone seems quite active, if you aren't already using a custom rom, have a look: http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=1730

Though the Keon propbably is the better choice anyway.

Try installing CyanogenMod 7.2. I have the same phone and it did MAGIC with mine.

I will be getting firefox-os just out of principle. I have a hard time trusting Apple or Google with my data. A (relatively) independent foundation just gives me a little bit more peace-of-mind that they are not trying to track, mine and predict the latest byte out of my phone.

Won't most FFOS apps talk by definition to a server? I wonder how "local" the native apps will be or whether developers will bother with working in offline mode even when connected to the internet.

Isn't Google behind Mozilla as well?

Mozilla receive ad revenue from Google. AFAIK Google has no control over Mozilla except obviously enabling Google to preemptively place a cookie on users' machines using the default, Googley homepage. Google integration, by definition, defies Mozilla's mission, but it's not because Google controls them. I'm okay with the integration knowing that I can fix it, though I wish there were a start-up option for novices, though.

Thanks for the answer.

No they are not.

On similar hardware, Firefox OS is not slower than Android, and rather a bit faster. Remember that developer phones are relatively low end ones (1GHz single core cpu, 512M of ram)

I agree with your wager, although given the choice I would rather have a physical keyboard than a polished OS. But maybe that's just me.

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