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Comment by dbpatterson | Hacker News Reader

They've always said they are aiming to target cheaper less powerful phones. Right now the bulk of the world is using cheap phones probably running Symbian or something similar. Whether they actually will be able to target that group is up for debate, but that's been their (stated) plan.

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They're serious about it, too. They're getting it to work under 128MB:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/FirefoxOS/Tarako

<disclaimer>I work for mozilla on fxos</disclaimer> And that works really well considering the price point and the hardware. Another benefit of working to make things good on this very low end device is that we made a number of performance improvements that benefit also other devices.

Something important to note compared to android is that android phones in this range are stuck with gingerbread and no official play store.

I don't think it's a good idea. Even with 256 MB FFOS is sluggish...

Replace all structs with unions and hope nobody ever uses the other parts of the data structure!

"They've always said they are aiming to target cheaper less powerful phones"

Android can increasingly be found on a lot of cheap, low-cost smartphones too - and there's a large established app marketplace. Firefox OS has a couple of potential advantages though. If the Firefox team can deliver on fast native performance for HTML apps, then development for the OS will be magnitudes easier (potentially) than developing for rival OSes.

User privacy is another feature where Firefox OS could easily outshine its rivals. I'd love to see a Firefox OS laptop that goes head to head with ChromeOS for example (Google's OS tracks everything you do - even printing to your desktop printer).

They're also targeting low-memory handsets which Android is excluding.

I Think WP and FirefoxOS are the two big players in the low-end smartphone market, and the victory of one of those depends on that segment of phones.

WindowsPhone8.1 already allow developers to use html5/js to create native apps (using winJS or any other framework) and the smartphone that sold most is the lumia520 -> the most low cost of all the wp gamma.

I hope FirefoxOS will succeed, but considering that MS is trowing literally Billions to keep wp alive, I doubt it will be easy.

I very much doubt that Windows Phone will be a player there. The Lumia 520 sells for ~150 USD without contract. That's the lowest WP8 can go. Nokia introduced their Android phones because they'll run on cheaper hardware.

The Lumia 520 actually sells for ~ $50 (or lower if you look around) with no contract[1]. Its the cheapest a phone can get for the given specs: 4" LCD touchscreen, 5MP camera & 13 days standby. Too bad it hasn't been hacked yet.

[1] http://www.walmart.com/ip/27449094

Ok, but in normal[1] place that phone costs ~100 euro. There's also an old price visible - 99.88$

[1] It's not a normal place http://www.walmart.com/ip/Jimmy-Dean-Croissant-Egg-with-Red-...

Fine, is amazon considered a normal place? Because even there its ~ $50. Infact everywhere I have looked it has been around that price.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Nokia-Lumia-520-GoPhone-AT/dp/B00E4504...

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