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Comment by diafygi | Hacker News Reader

The previous generation (ZTE Open) started at $79 and is now $69. This price point was so impressive for the html5 capabilities that it had. I even did a presentation on it's SVG performance vs. a similar Android device[1].

I'm concerned about the increased $99 price point. I thought the target market for Firefox OS was the developing world, where they could release extremely low cost phones ($50-$80) that can run the full gamut of html5 (vs. Android that is stuck in 2.3 for phones this cheap). Why release new phones that won't see as much adoption (because of the higher price)?

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3MU3jxEye8

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Don't panic. We're actively working on the $25 dollar phone that was reported earlier in the year (e.g. http://www.cnet.com/news/with-firefox-os-mozilla-begins-the-...). So there will be quite the range of price points to be had.

Do you know if the phone will work with T-Mobile's 3G data?

Would be useful if potential customers could quickly see in a table which carriers are supported and upto what data speeds.

Woo! Great news! One of benefits of having cheap devices is that it significantly lowers the barrier to entry for the developer community. It becomes super encouraging to pick up a phone just to fiddle.

However, one of the biggest problems the community ran into for the ZTE Open was that hardly any Mozilla devs had one. So even though it was the most easily obtainable phone for the dev community, it received very little Mozilla support.

As these low-end devices push the limits the most for Firefox OS, will the Mozilla team start to work with them more?

Some Mozilla devs have them, mostly in the Taipei team where a lot of the work on this phone is occurring. Hopefully they'll become more common as time goes on.

> This price point was so impressive for the html5 capabilities that it had.

No, it isn't. The price is standard, or even high, for the hardware it has. And the hardware is pretty crap (hence why the performance was also crap).

All phones have equal HTML5 capabilities, the difference is what you can do while getting good performance. And the answer to that on the ZTE Open was "not a damn thing", because it never had good performance.

Agreed that the hardware was on par or slightly lower than other $80 smartphones. However, phones with that hardware can only run Android 2.3, which severely limits your html5 capabilities. The presentation I linked above was comparing the svg performance between Firefox OS and Android.

The Sony e1 is the same hardware and runs 4.3

Are you talking about the Sony Xperia E1? Comparing to the two[1], it has twice the RAM and more+faster cores than the ZTE Open. Also, isn't it like $169 or something?

[1] - http://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=5966&idPhone2=...

Opera and Firefox both support Android 2.3. So no, your HTML5 capabilities are not limited.

You also aren't limited to Android 2.3 in $80 phones anyway. Most of the cheap, Chinese imports come with newer versions of Android anyway.

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