Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
On the $70 ZTE phone, it's less than stellar, mainly because the phone has issues registering touches. Also, there are some software bugs, like momentum being saved when it should have decayed, after you lift your finger 5s later in certain scrollable views.
If the newer phones have better touch screens, and the OS consistently gets improved, especially on UI front, I could really see this succeeding and taking a sizable market share.
Regardless, it'll change the game, and motivate Google & Apple to step up their support for HTML as a platform. It's already happening, with Android KitKat [1].
[1] http://java.dzone.com/articles/android-44-kitkat-browser-and
That said, I believe that even a slow Firefox OS phone that at least handles touch interaction elegantly and responsively has a good chance of succeeding in displacing feature phones in developing markets.
From there, a friend mentioned that a lot of the UI in the latest devices with the untainted google experience had gone that direction in 4.x, I got a first gen Nexus 7... loved it, from there was going to get a Nexus, but held out for the Nexus 4. The first "smart" phone I actually liked... didn't wish it were a little more responsive, or a little faster.
The down side, even now, technical difficulties persist. For some reason the bluetooth doesn't sync to my car unless I turn it off, then back on... my last phone (ZTE) was worse than the samsung I had before that, or my G1.
Most people wouldn't stick with this kind of experience if there's something perceived to be better available. If the iPhone were available on a carrier other than AT&T early on, I would have switched over from my G1.
Something tells me that poor experiences on cheap Firefox OS devices will only lead to more Android and iOS adoption in those markets.
* async pan and zoom
* `will-change` support (avoid layers flattening) progressive tiles rendering
* better texture allocation mechanism
* CSS snapping
* position: sticky
* and many gaia code improvements (reflow and lags hunting)
I wonder if Firefox might find it easier to just pick up existing low end android models and see if they can get a better experience with Firefox OS.
[1] http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/13/google-removes-apps-ops-p...
A relatively low risk strategy might be see what's out there in volume, tweak, adopt and apply downward price pressure. Those phones have the advantage of already being in production with many units worth of experience. Starting at $70 with the aim of getting to $25 may not be a long way of getting there.
I don't really know anything about the business. Just thinking out loud.
It's entirely possible that a $25 smartphone will still be junk [2] until well after some other platform is created, polished and delivered to those users.
[1] Touch-based phones and tablets
[2] that is, flawed-enough that feature-phones and used phones are preferable to the experience provided by a 'new' $25 smartphone.
In the end, what killed the OLPC was politics, not product execution. And the initiative was widely sucessfull, just in a way that was different from the stated roadmap.
Mozila is in a similar situation here. If somebody else make a device that replace their phones, they'll probably see it as sucess.
Rasberry pi seemed more like a 'hey, we could build x at this price. That's cool. Let's do it.' Olpc had a more complex longer term goal.
"Looking at nice dual-core dual-SIM 3G Android for $30-40 wholesale. Quad-core for $100-125. And increasingly hard to tell apart from premium" (tweet from @BenedictEvans this morning).
And free OS is free OS ? How does either add to the cost of the phone?
Am I missing something?
Not that more competition is not a better thing, I mean I love my firefox browser and only grudgingly use chrome.
Some Android apps that are part of the typical Google-logo Android user experience have become resource intensive. Dalvik, even with the addition of a JIT compiler, was initially targeted at a very low resource requirement, and, apart from the JIT compiler, which is highly tuned to working in small battery powered devices, there have been no fundamental changes to the Dalvik VM until the recent release of ART as a replacement runtime.
At the very least you need a battery that lets you actually use that browser for more than 15 minutes. That's about $10. Now there's $15 left for a touch display and a chipset and all the rest of it. That's very hard to imagine.
If the Firefox OS runs a browser brilliantly on this device, it might be a disruptor in the more developed world actually. But I find it unlikely that a low-cost smartphone with the level of power one can expect could do that (even my Nexus5 still chokes on loading some pages, chews battery running the browser, etc), so
> "You're talking about a clumsy smartphone that's a little bit better than a feature phone - still primarily for voice and text."
will probably remain true.
Keep in mind that the "rest of the world" on average still runs on 2G with spotty 3G coverage, and uses little more of smartphone (or feature phone) functionality than Whatsapp (because that's all that can effectively function as intended on those networks).
The phone itself being cheaper does little to change their usage patterns: In India, before the iOS/Android smartphone era (~2006), even middle class schoolkids or the working class in oppressed areas who didn't have a solid roof over their head still had Sony Ericsson Walkman phones ($200 then) and Nokia N66s ($150-$300 over its lifetime). People like fancy phones in the developing world, and lowering the price will make the tiniest of dents in that space.
That may be true, but it is changing rapidly. Ericsson, ZTE and Huawei are all betting large on rapid 3G deployment throughout sub-Saharan Africa, for example.
Even countries like Ethiopia is seeing the start of 4G deployments.
[1] Not part of some mega company's mega cloud