Hacker News Reader

Comment by oblique63 | Hacker News Reader

> Also an iPhone is the opposite of a free phone, so this is no competition for Firefox OS.

Now, I'm a big anti-apple/open source proponent too, but just having that as a selling point isn't gonna win them a whole lot of users; just look at what happened with the OpenMoko project.

After watching the demo, I think it might've made a decent competitor back when Gingerbread was still fresh, but now I'm not so sure. If there's one thing I do admire about Apple, it's that they seem to really only release stuff that's 'fully baked', even if not everybody agrees with the decisions they make.

View on HN

> If there's one thing I do admire about Apple, it's that they seem to really only release stuff that's 'fully baked'

Unfortunately, they overbaked Maps.

OpenMoko is virtually unheard of even within the tech world. Firefox is a good, strong brand for the OS to ride on.

By "fully baked" do you mean a phone that can only run web apps? (Note that I'm talking about the original iPhone, not Firefox OS).

I meant more in terms of performance and UX than features. If Firefox OS delivers on displaying web apps really darn well, then more power to it, but the demo didn't really stand out in that way either. Most likely the poor hardware, but again, that's still part of the end user experience which is crucial imo. Ubuntu's mobile os seems to perform much more smoothly from the demos I've seen for example, but I'm not sure how the hardware compares to the sets that were used for these Firefox os demos.

Indeed, when comparing ubuntu's mobile os running on a galaxy nexus with firefox os running on very cheap hardware, you should expect a difference. I would be interested in seing how ubuntu mobile runs on a 69 euro phone.

Yeah, I'd be curious to see that too. However, end users don't usually care about hardware specs directly, they care about the end experience. And if you're pushing for a new platform right now, you have to really try and build an ecosystem around it as soon as possible by earning enough fans and developers to keep the platform sustainable. And as developers, I know we like to think we're rather objective about a technology's 'true' merits, but UX impacts our decisions too. So if Ubuntu ships their OS on hardware that will provide a better experience than any FFOS phone out there, Imma place my bets on the OS that shipped with the better overall UX out the gate (even if it's not as cheap initially). I mean, it's not like we didn't already see this partially play out with WebOS. Even Windows phones are struggling and they seem to have a really nice UX...

This is why I'm more excited about Ubuntu Mobile than Firefox OS. With Ubuntu, I get an open ecosystem with native performance and am not locked into using the Firefox browser. If the gesture system on Ubuntu is done as well as the BlackBerry 10, it will be a welcome change from iOS's and Android's UI.

It refers to polish and usability, not filling feature checkboxes. Yes, the original iPhone was "fully baked". It didn't have every feature that everybody wanted (and I'll agree that this was a big missing feature), but what it did, it did extremely well.

No it didn't. It was a mediocre-to-crappy phone, mediocre to-crappy browser, and mediocre-to-crappy ipod, a mediocre-to-crappy GPS navigator, and mediocre-to-crappy Youtube player, a plain old crappy camera. Putting a layer of gloss on the UI doesn't change that.

Now of course, we live in the world of apps and the iPhone has become what it was always destined to be: a mediocre-to-crappy, yet socially acceptable, gameboy. Ha-ha, only serious.

No really, having all those things in one touchscreen device was pretty cool, and certainly pointed the way to the future. The predictable myth-making around Apple is as boring as ever though.

It's just I can remember when the myth-making was around the iPod and "it only does one thing, and it does it really well", and suddenly the iPhone comes along and does everything and anything, usually (though not always) quite a bit worse than dedicated devices. And suddenly perfection gets redefined (yet again) to whatever Apple is currently doing.

It's not "myth-making." I was there, and the only reason I didn't keep my original iPhone was because AT&T sucked way too hard at the time. It was plenty "baked". You may disagree with Apple's design or implementation decisions, but it was definitely not unfinished.

Don't you think that the NSA debacle makes ordinary people more and more people sensitive about there freedom?

Trust is the baseground of any purchase.

Freedom is not only the selling point to customers but also and more importantly to the telephone companies. It seems that they appreciate that freedom a lot. They have the marketing power to make the phones a success in the mass market.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com