Mozilla's 4.5” Dual-Core Reference Phone | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla's 4.5” Dual-Core Reference Phone

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41 pointscpeterso52 comments

DEAR PHONE MANUFACTURERS:

WE DON'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT THIN PHONES. WE WANT BIG BATTERIES THAT LAST MANY DAYS.

Sorry for an all-caps comment that is only tangentially relevant to this particular article/phone, but I am goddam sick and tired of NO mainstream phone manufacturers getting out of this "We'll compete on fractions of millimeters that you'll never notice, we'll tell you what you want, we'll condition you to plug in your phone every chance you get like some kind of direct-current junkie"

Ugh.

I totally agree and we are working on this. Mozilla is a small company and building an OS is no easy feat - but power is definitely one of the metrics on our radar.

You can read about our testing methodology here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G/Performance/Power_Testing

Edit - we are working on this from the software side of things obviously. The hardware side of things is mostly out of our control for production devices, but I do hope to see longer battery life for all.

Large battery and a QWERTY keyboard please. I don't care if it's three times as thick as an iPhone, that's what I want. My HTC Desire Z isn't going to last forever, I need an upgrade path.

Who is “we”? Please speak four yourself.

There's that feeling of loneliness when you want something, but the market moves away and leaves you with only out of date devices fully matching your needs. I sympathize.

And if there is a market for 5mm case+battery packs (and really, aren't these almost only available for iPhones?) there should be a market for a phone with twice or more battery life from the start, built-in. I don't think nakedrobot2 is the only one wanting that.

> And if there is a market for 5mm case+battery packs (and really, aren't these almost only available for iPhones?)

For phones with replaceable batteries such battery cases are somewhat unnecessary as you can just make/use an extended battery with a replacement back cover. Check out this beauty, for instance: ;)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/5200mAh-Extended-GT-I9505-18-Month-W...

I had spare batteries when using feature phones. And most of the time I'd want to use one the spare would be dead, because:

1. the main battery is dead because I didn't think about charging it. The chances I would have remembered charging the spare were abysmal as well.

2. I also need a spare charger for the spare battery. Or I'd need to swap it in the phone when I have access to an outlet, and it would take twice the time to charge the main battery and the spare. Again, time and preparation.

All in all, an extension to the phone is clunky, but still the best trade-off if I needed it.

> There's that feeling of loneliness when you want something, but the market moves away and leaves you with only out of date devices fully matching your needs. I sympathize.

I sympathize as well, but manufacturers aren't 100% to blame here. They make what people buy, and people want thin phones because it makes them feel like they're living in the future™.

> And if there is a market for 5mm case+battery packs there should be a market for a phone with twice or more battery life from the start, built-in. I don't think nakedrobot2 is the only one wanting that.

You're asking the wrong question. There's a "market" for just about anything. The question is, how big is it? How big are companies like Morphie? Are they big enough that a company like Samsung --- forget Apple, because we all know it takes Jupiter-sized markets for Apple to add new SKUs -- to roll variants of their current line up to serve this market?

Sorry for the truckload of rhetorical questions. We already know the answers to those questions, because we can observe the market. I'm just glad the market is large enough to support companies like Morphie, because otherwise, we'd be out of luck entirely.

Him and me. I think that is already enough for we ;)

I could join the bigger battery crowd. We are stuck with the same battery life an iPhone 1 had. The incremental battery and efficiency gains are consumed by displays and more and more apps running in the background and we still don't have a phone that can last a day on moderate burn.

Or just make a standard for batteries like AA and just let people replace them. Its revolutionary idea that has been around for the last couple of decades.

I am pretty sure that 100% of the market does not want only thin phones :) But that is what the market is currently offering.

I am pretty sure that frequent travellers, workers who are constantly on the move, using maps, etc. etc. want a battery that doesn't die before lunch time.

I'm sure it's plenty more than 1% of the market so let's just say 'millions'.

He isn't speaking two you?

If you want features like that, you'll have to go for the relatively unknown Chinese brands, since they rely less on advertising and more on functionality.

Like this one for example: http://www.gizchina.com/2013/11/07/jiayu-g5-unboxing-hands-o...

I'm of the opinion that a need for daily charging is a perfectly acceptable trade-off for a phone that fits unobtrusively into one's trouser pocket.

If I'm going to be away from a USB port or wall socket for an extended period of time, I can always bring an external USB battery.

Check out Lenovo S860 or Huawei Ascend Mate 2, they have 4000 mAh batteries.

Also check the Nokia Ashas, they have good battery life and decent size (you can just put it in your pocket), but are just "feature phones" with shitloads of closed source stuff in it.

Uh, well, I like thin phones. 18 hours on a charge is enough for me.

What I would like is to have an external rechargeable battery to come with my phone instead of buying one from a third party, as I find that a great compromise.

YMMV. I for instance LOOOOVE thin gadgets. I never knew how much I wanted really thin gadgets until I had them.

I mean, presumably the market is speaking here.

I for one just want a regular sized phone. One I could put in my pocket. But no, manufacturers decided that they will push being huge (and being thin as you mentioned) as something people want. The phones that I might consider buying are now labeled as mini or compact. And they are still huge.

(this is mostly about android market)

That's because people buy them. Many of the best selling Android phones are the huge models. The thing is once you start going to 5" and above, with high PPI, your phone can start replacing small tablets. I used to carry around a 4.3" lower res phone and a 7" tablet, but with a 5" 1920x1080 display I just gradually stopped using the tablet entirely. When my may use is not as a phone but for data while commuting, huge is great.

People buy them because they are told it's a desirable feature. Some prefer it, sure... But majority of users have no clue and will buy whatever they are served via marketing. Then you have people who are forced into it, because alternatives are scarce and more expensive. Same thing as with wide-screen laptops. Because all people do on laptops is watch movies. Doesn't matter that it's worse for everything else.

The rule of thumb is that screen cannot be larger than 4" to be fully accessible using thumb only. Often you have only one hand available, which makes most of allegedly "awesome" 4.5"+ smartphones inconvenient at best and useless at worst. I don't get this whole 5"+ mindset. If you want something bigger (what for? watching movies?), isn't it better to have 7" tablet while leaving your phone handy?

---

I'm user of Galaxy Ace 2 / i8160 with 3.8" screen and 480 x 800 resolution. I'll change it only for something with 1280x768, but with screen no bigger than 4". Good pixel density (i.e. ~250+ ppi) is really important for comfortable reading. And better battery is a must.

I have Motorola Defy. Over three years old, great build quality, waterproof, 3.7", 480x854 (265ppi). I'm okay with the phone itself (a bit too thick perhaps), but the support is crap. The original android was 2.2 and was unusable. With cyanogen mod it's somewhat usable, but noticeable slow. I could live with a bigger screen, but not too much. It was quite cheap too. After over two years of usage not a scratch on the screen and the body still holds together. I drop the phone all the time (oftentimes when tossing it into air, or trying to land it into bed). No extra covers on it either.

Now I'm looking for a new phone.. and there's nothing. I'll most likely end up with a 4.3" phone...

I have a 5" smartphone and holding it in one hand, I can just reach all of the screen with my thumb; 5.3" or 6" would be too large for me. I wouldn't consider my hands large either - they're probably slightly below-average in size. People's hands definitely vary in size, so it's understandable that what someone finds 4" just right would have trouble with anything bigger, and likewise in the other direction.

"The rule of thumb", indeed.

Like everything else, it was better in the 80s.

Correction: We want SMALL/THIN batteries that last many days.

I still miss my Nokia E52.

You know, I'm not a technology luddite, and I have a smartphone (iPhone), but I have to wonder about all those complaining about battery life.

Your problem isn't battery life. Your problem is you spend many, many hours a day staring at that phone and depleting its quite reasonable battery life. What the hell are you doing that takes you all so much time?

And what's with "last many days". I mean, don't you sleep? Where you sleep, is electricity not available? Honestly, I want to know.

I don't think you're "some kind of direct-current junkie", I think you're a smartphone junkie.

This is too one-sided, so here's another angle: ease & peace of use. As in: not constantly having to worry you won't be able to use your phone because you forgot to charge it. I don't have a very smart phone, use it mainly for calls and messages. The thing barely lasts a couple of days even if it gets hardly used. So relying on it for emergencies for instance (no fixed line) means having to take really good care of it. I for one would be much happier with a bulky smartphone that would have weeks of battery life and doesn't require paying that much attention to battery life. (I know maybe I can get a plain cell phone that lasts longer, but that would mean having to give up some handy features of the typical smartphone)

Your problem is you spend many, many hours a day staring at that phone

nope

quite reasonable battery life

let's call that an opinion. I also have a music player that gets used hours every week and lasts months. There's no smartphone in the world, even when you'd turn of the screen and all services except music playing that can do that, so I don't consider it that reasonable.

Where you sleep, is electricity not available?

definitely not always, no. And then we're back at the reliability part. You see, the reason I originally bought a cell phone, long before there was such a thing as a smart phone, was because we used to take trips to rocky areas in the middle of nowhere to do trials riding. One day a guy broke his leg, open wound etc. In no condition to be moved by us to the car, let alone be moved sitting in a car. Having no cell phone meant it took over an hour to get help there. Luckily he didn't bleed to death. So then we decided a cellphone would be of use. Well, if the battery isn't dead of course.

My Nexus S (which admittedly is not new, but battery is) lasted about a day if I used it a bit and up to two days if I turned the cell data and wireless off and didn't touch it. Wifi, location and bluetooth were turned on strictly on need basis and for as long as I needed them.

A bit means turning the screen on for a minute 3-4 times a day and not more than one call lasting <5 minutes.

I do sleep, but not always somewhere I could plug it in (camps, cheap hotels without plugs...), but to be honest even if I can, I don't particularly like tending to my phone like it was some kind of tamagotchi.

I have to agree. If you take phone, turn off cell data, leave on wireless, and put in drawer, it should already last for quite a while (days, if not weeks).

I don't like this kind of argument. The user wants a certain experience, and the hardware isn't able to provide it properly. Your answer is to change the requirements, to tell the user to behave differently? The product should be shaped after the use, not the other way around.

I think it's more along the lines of 'this phone is designed for a certain type of use case' and the user is trying to use the smartphone as their primary PC and media device, which it's designed to complement, not replace.

I would very much prefer an easy way to go 'off the grid' - one button to disable all the shit that is draining your battery. 3G, data, location services, Wi-Fi.

Jailbreak used to help on iPhone and they did introduce the swipe bar to disable Wi-Fi, but put so many more obstacles to disable the rest.

Disabling location services will now prompt you whether you are sure you want to disable AFTER A FUCKING DELAY.

I would like very much that Google Maps wouldn't point me in a middle of ocean when my location services are disabled and I just want to peek at a map, not to find out where is some badly SEO'd shop.

But most of all, I would like apps to keep the data I opened 5 minutes ago. I just hate when you are in the tube, had your route planned and suddenly all the info is gone. Or the comment you wrote on HN and switched a tab is gone after refresh. Apple, PUT SOME FUCKING RAM ON YOUR IOS DEVICES.

This may be predictable, but all those things are a lot less of an issue on Android.

Agree with you, but that's like putting on your trousers over your head.

3 crappy UXs daily vs. hundreds? No thanks.

Android (AOSP) these days is not a functionally complete mobile OS with Google pushing lots of functionality into their closed apps. Mobile really needs a complete OS which devs can use as an off-the-shelf product, and mod according to their needs. FirefoxOS and Ubuntu Mobile are probably the only real contenders now. Both have their pros and cons, but I sincerely hope that either of them (if not both) would succeed.

One very important thing Google added to the ecosystem was drivers. Android using Linux essentially made nearly all mobile hardware work on Linux, even though some drivers are closed. I remember the days when getting a projector to work with Linux was a pain, and I am not even 25!

EDIT:

My comment on AOSP is in this context:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/neithe...

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-...

I do accept that Google has added great value to the ecosystem with AOSP. It's just that AOSP is pretty much unusable for people without the resources of Amazon, Nokia, Mozilla, etc. I want something like Debian/Ubuntu. It's pretty much possible for a single person to build a customized OS for computers. We need that for mobile.

I have to disagree with the statement that AOSP is not functionally complete. I'm using it on a Nexus handset with F-Droid and I'm really pleased at how easy it was to switch over.

I was rooting my phone anyway and this started as an experiment. I had the ROM and the separately packaged Google Apps package (Google Play Services, etc...) and thought I'd try skipping the extra Google stuff to see how it worked. Haven't looked back since. Some of the replacement apps are functionally superior to the Google versions, though I concede these are not as user-friendly for non-technical users.

Nothing against Google really, I have a GMail account as a secondary email and I like the default Google search on the Firefox browser. I just don't need any more than that and so reject the added complexity of flashing all the Google stuff on top of AOSP.

I did the same thing with an older Galaxy S that I have lying around. I installed CyanogenMod on it without Google's services. Have been installing apps from F-Droid. I use Apollo, VLC, K-9 Mail, OsmAnd and Firefox. At some point I also installed some apps from Amazon's App Store, but I then realized that I don't really need any of that crap.

People saying that AOSP is not usable don't know what they are talking about.

That said, I'm also planning to get a phone with Firefox OS and I think it has a bright future, just because it is based on web standards. I really like the approach taken by Firefox OS and Chrome OS.

> People saying that AOSP is not usable don't know what they are talking about.

The Linux kernel is usable. Why don't you just start from scratch with the kernel?

When I say AOSP is not usable for normal folks, I mean it's not comparable to the existing solutions we have for computers.

Dianne's response to the recent "AOSP is unusable" silliness is pretty solid: http://www.hnwatcher.com/r/734444/Google-s-Dianne-Hackborn-c...

Regarding drivers, we expended a lot of effort to push things as open as we could. We never shipped any binary kernel drivers for any lead devices, something which most OEMs and silicon vendors seem to have stuck with. We insisted on linux-on-the-metal instead of solutions where it would be virtualized under a closed hypervisor that had the "real" drivers and other such insanity.

GPU drivers have been the biggest uphill battle -- getting all the vendors to agree to GPLv2 kernel components to handle resource management and ensure that userspace is not directly poking the hardware, alongside their "secret sauce" in userspace was better than nothing and better than closed binary kernel components, but not ideal. It seems like we're finally seeing some motion in this area.

Watching Nokia, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and others take AOSP from its git repositories and build full products on top of it is, I think, among the best evidence that there's an awfully useful base platform there.

If people were to augment that with open source alternatives to various Google (or other) cloud services, that would be cool.

And of course folks can take AOSP as a base and extend or modify it however they like in a fully open way -- follow the model of cyanogenmod that's been tracking AOSP and adding their own enhancements, goodies, or platform support on top of it, for example...

Your points are noted, and I agree with you. But I'm not convinced by Dianne's post. Big red flag is what on earth you need cloud for to provide a location service? And mail? An MTU is a client app by definition. Open implies supporting popular protocols - that hardly creates a dependency on Gmail. The biggest issue of all though is how most apps are virtually unusable without an internet connection. That, in the real world, happens a hell of a lot more often than people like Dianne care to realise. I call bullshit. Her post is as biased as the posts she's responding to.

The reason you need tho cloud for location service is because you can save user time and battery by doing a lookup based on nearby wifi points, a database of which is stored in the cloud.

Relevantly, Mozilla are trying to build an open one of these.

https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2013/10/28/introducing-the...

Though privacy issues make it complicated for people to just download the data, rather than make a call to the cloud. Those who object to the whole idea of this will probably just have to accept slower lookups.

I'm not sure what you're saying with your other points, I would have thought a GMail app would be expected to have a dependency on GMail. The Email app (which Ars claimed was abandoned, yet just got a overhaul) is there for communicating over popular protocols to non-Google services.

I use a normal (non-Gmail dependent) MTU for my Gmail. What user need does the Gmail-dependent MTU from Google fulfill that warrants that dependency? As far as I can tell, my non-Google MTU adds more functionality to GMail than GMail has.

As for AGPS - great. But we already know that location services function quite well without it. Did you know that you can do AGPS and drastically reduce time to fix just by initializing a GPS receiver using your last known location? AGPS with a location obtained from a WiFi SSID (via a call to the cloud) is only faster when your last known location is drastically different to your current location (another state, or country). I won't believe that Google is incapable of designing a location API that's extensible. There's a non-technical reason, and that reason is in conflict with the openness Google likes to play up.

Except other than a minority, no users will care if they don't get access to Google services.

That mobile OS is Mer (-> and Jolla with Sailfish OS). It's probably the only real contender at the moment.

Ah. I recently bought a used iPhone 3GS for $40 on eBay because my old Motorola Atrix's screen is sort of broken.

I didn't want to get a new phone until I have a budget. I thought about getting ZTE Open but two things pushes me away from FxOS.

1. ZTE Open's spec is many times weaker than my Atrix's. I already find Atrix slow. Spending $70 on a phone in that spec is still not affordable for me.

2. The FxOS ecosystem is still a lot smaller than iOS and Android. I know it is new but that a number of popular apps (Instagram, Gmail, GMap) are not yet available on Mozilla Marketplace.

I understand that the initial launch is targeting at countries where smartphone usage is low. But what people need is a phone not buggy and laggy.

I want to see a phone with powerful spec so #1 goes away. I can then still rely on the web interface to do #2, provided that the phone is powerful enough so I won't lag while opening multiple web pages!

I like FireFox OS and I really want to own one, but right now I am going with iOS (I will avoid Android) given how rock solid iOS is in my experience.

Keep up the good work, FxOS team.

Great news that Firefox OS will be on tablets (VIA Vixen, Foxconn InFocus) too.

I wonder if there are already plans for Firefox OS release for desktop/notebook (like ChromeOS). This could be a huge thing.

I know this came up before in Firefox OS threads, but .. I failed to dig it up.

Any phone recommendations? Reference devices sounds fine, but

a) where do I get one (and for how much)?

b) what other options do I have to get into Firefox OS?

The ZTE Open is probably the easiest route to go, and you can order it on ebay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/ZTE-Open-powered-by-Firefox-OS-3G-un...

But the ZTE Open C is should be just around the corner: http://www.engadget.com/2014/02/23/hands-on-zte-open-c/

Alternatively if you have a nexus 4 or 5 you can flash FirefoxOS on top of it.

I looked at that (Open, didn't know about the Open C, thanks!) before and while that looks like a reasonable (price) entry, I wonder multiple things:

- how well these devices are supported? Are these FF OS devices really future proof for a while (think 'supported' upstream, kinda like Nexus devices or fully supported CyanogenMod builds)? Can I follow FF OS without waiting for e.g. ZTE?

- Those are low spec devices. I understand that FF OS wants to target the lower end of the market and is supposed to work well in that environment. But is that the case? Will I be able to give these a spin as my primary device for a time?

The second issue is lower in priority. Even if these things don't allow me to replace my main Android phone, I'd still love to peek at FF OS and play with the development environment, but a 'daily driver' would be quite interesting as well.. Only thing I found so far is the Geeksphone Revolution, but without testing it first/getting a decent idea of what that can do I don't like to spend 250-300 EUR (and that doesn't seem to be a high-end device either).

Nonsense. If AOSP isn't functionally complete now, it was never functionally complete. Nothing has been removed from AOSP.

I know you meant that at 'pcx but while AOSP is functionally complete in terms of it giving you a base to work from, most would consider the lacking services, etc that it's missing to mean that it's not what most consider "Android". Of course, I love hacking on AOSP and it doesn't bother me, for a ROM that replaces the "missing" Google services, Replicant is the way to go.

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