Unboxing and setting up the Firefox OS ZTE
danieru.com
danieru.com
"To be honest I think the box achieves the goal. I do not expect FxOS to be complete. I expect it to have room for improvement and to be welcoming of my contributions. That is what FxOS needs right now, the luxury boxes can come later."
Amen. Well-written, and I hope you enjoy your new FxOS :)
* You probably want to use a mobile network (like GSM) for phone calls and data. As long as you're booked into the network, the carrier knows (approximately) where you are.
* If you use Wifi, you can be tracked by your MAC address
To just reduce the amount of tracking by companies (not governments) a little bit, it would help to use distributed services like XMPP instead of Whatsapp and Facebook. Then you could choose service providers that you trust, or host your own server, and still have interoperability with other people. Because businesses like lock-in, this will probably not happen for the majority of people.
There is a startup that does exactly this - track MAC addresses of cell phones in stores, and then resell that data to store owners, so they can track who comes into their stores: http://www.getnomi.com/
this is the single worst accessibility issue on most browsers. Android is the only one who gets it right (and i guess mozilla now as well). but for microsoft and apple to still not provide this functionality is just mind blowing.
EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions guys, I'm a tad sketched out by the no-name chinese copies. They look good, but you have to wonder whether they go through decent QA processes and have to comply with the same safety laws as phones sold in the US.
The B92m is last years model, and I bought it for about $240 at the time. This year you can get quad core full hd (1920x1080) phones for the same price.
Basically it is down to reading reviews in advance to ensure the features you care about works as they should.
Safety is really not a concern when it comes to the phone itself - if you're worried, throw away the charger and pick up any USB charger you trust more.
Overall keep in mind that most of these "copies" are only copies or imitations of better known brands on the surface - if you open them up what you tend to see is boards that are closely following the same reference boards for either MTK (Taiwanese fab-less manufacturer; one of the worlds largest semiconductor companies), Rockchip or AllWinner (Cinese mainland) CPUs.
You can pick up devices from dozens of different manufacturers and find boards that are close to (or totally) identical in most of the ones using the same SOCs. In the case of AllWinner at least, chances are the devices are designed by close partners of AllWinner - I'm assuming the same is the case for MTK and Rockchip.
The upside of this is that it's not like some random little outfit have actually designed most of the internals of most of these phones - they're largely well tested designs from well established large engineering companies. Most of them are also very simple, relying on MTK, AllWinner or Rockchip SOCs that embed most of the functionality in a single package, so the boards often just break out ports and have minor supporting circuitry which is presumably a big reason why they're so popular with this market segment.
http://blowakening.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/convierte-tu-gee...
(I used google translate, it translates great)
Or you could find a Nexus 4 used. I bet some of those are in your price range. Neither has LTE, though, not sure if that is a requirement for you.
Maybe when the Nexus 5 ships, the resellers will lower their prices. Or just sell in countries with inflated retail prices.
I really like the ZTE Open and am switching to it for full time use. But I'd generally advise at this stage most people would not be happy to do this. The touch screen is unresponsive, the phone is generally sluggish and the range of apps is limited. The apps that are there have limited functionality. I think it would be a much better experience built with say LuaJIT and FFI and a kernel of C routines for heavy lifting in apps. But it is what it is, and ultimately I'm a big fan of the experiment Mozilla is undertaking using Web technologies to deliver such a platform - but its going to be a long road. Part of this is also colored by my experiences developing for Android and iOS.
The reason I'm switching is that I prefer to carry a cheaper phone around, and I only need very basic services (basically happy to receive phone calls, and send texts and occasionally browse to a web page in an emergency). I am also very impressed philosophically with what Mozilla is trying to achieve here. I almost returned the Nexus 4 and Nokia 520 when I got them because it is very difficult to set them up without getting funnelled into over sharing your private information with cloud services.
My second choice of phone would be the Nokia 520 for pure value for money. But my view is only an iPhone or an Android device have first class web browsing capabilities and first class app ecosystems. Go with the Nokia 520 and its a reasonable (if simple phone), but does the basics (_except_ notification) well.
My third choice is my old iPhone 1, it does what it says on the tin. Its stuck on a very old version of iOS, but I think its fine for a phone.
My final choice is the Nexus 4. Its the best built of the phones. It has the best range of apps. Using Android feels like a real chore to me.
While Firefox os looks interesting, the ZTE Open is quite low end.
I've replaced that with a firefox phone after it died (some sort of bug where using contacts would crash it - hey, it was still OK as a tablet).
Next phone I torture myself with will hopefully be a Jolla.
TLDR - you get what you pay for.
Which is far worse if you buy a ZTE open. I had a ZTE blade , no update to ICS , and the display lasted 2 month. You definetly get what you pay for but ZTE phones are crap.
Otoh the g300 was a choice between an ancient version of android or a modern one that was very sluggish.
The g300 completely died in the end, along the way it killed an sd card before completely giving up.
Im not buying huawei again.. The zte im typing this on was a third of the price and although frustrating at times, its to be expected as its quite early days.
It's a great little device. It's incredible what $80 can buy you. Having said this I don't think I would recommend it as an everyday device. The hardware is slightly underpowered and the screen resolution is too low for my taste. I think you could get a much better browsing experience by spending $50-$100 more on a different device.
I can't wait until a FFOS device in the $200-$300 range comes out. It will be amazing.
If I made it sound like Firefox OS was just a fancy application launcher, that was not my intent.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/967817
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.b2g/q20P...
Is is really as bad as it seems?
[EDIT] - it is stonkingly cheap, and is amazing for the price.
When viewing a missed call I would see the phone number appear first and then the name of the contact replace the number. As if it takes a fraction of a second for it to match the number to the name. It did that every time and I didn't add that many contacts to my phone.
FYI I haven't updated to the most recent Firefox OS release so some of those issues might have been fixed.
Text input is not as slick as other phones..
Maps are not super good to use.
.. I tend not to write much text on it, as its a lot more effort.
Browsing is mostly good though a lot of sites will overload it.
What are you talking about ? Firefox os made a choice i wish them good luck.
If you are talking about phone oses is general Android is hackable,it's not just aimed at content consumers. As for specific languages you can code in java ,c/c++,python,... or javascript with android. you are not tied to anything.
aimed solely at content consumers: No. FxOS phones can't do as much as a Nexus 4 or iPhone, but they aren't meant to compete with those. Mozilla's targeting emerging markets where most people don't have smartphones or maybe even computers at all. At $80 unsubsidized, the ZTE Open is approaching feature-phone price and it can do a lot more than a feature phone (and will do more still once FxOS matures).
neutered only to run web browsers: It has full-fledged apps. Using web technology under the hood isn't the same as running in a browser.
NIH development environments: You can't get much less NIH than adopting the web itself, which everyone already uses and develops for, as your platform. If you look in the Firefox Marketplace, many of the apps you see now are web apps, written without FxOS in mind at all, with maybe 15-45 minutes of effort to package them for the marketplace.
tied down to specific languages: There are hundreds of languages that compile to JavaScript[1], and some, like ClojureScript, are already seeing real-world use in commercial apps[2]. With Emscripten, you can use any language that compiles to native. There are performance and debugging challenges but they're getting addressed with efforts like Asm.js and source maps. In 2013 you don't have to write JavaScript to use the web as a platform.
1. https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...
Now I just wish that Palm and Sprint would have put more into the hardware for the builds.