When the FirefoxOS developer device was posted on here some time ago half the comments were about how it was missing feature X or Y that Android or iPhone has had for ages, and therefore it just couldn't compete.
A $70 price point doesn't put them in competition with other smart phones, it puts Mozilla at the fore of a new class of customer.
I'm looking to equip everyone in our startup with a 'company' phone, that is to say one that I can wipe remotely without anyone being upset.
Once 8.1 is out, the 521 will allow me to put a secure VPN connection, easily toggleable, has a good enough for hell RDP client running some powershell.
I can also fairly easily make something to use WMI to query a bunch of important details for our prod environments.
That's really not a bad price point for such a device.
"The current handsets, which are sold via eBay, retail at £59.99 in the UK, or $69.99 in the US."
This generally means that targeting the lowest end of the market isn't a great idea unless you are trying to make money off the sale of the device alone and not ongoing services like apps.
If there's no way to do something similar on Firefox OS, then I see that as a much worse hindrance to the ecosystem than the income demographic they are targeting.
He's already submitted a git browser: https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/git-browser
Even if it didn't have any apps, it provides complete and open access to the Internet for $25 to people who might not otherwise have access to it. Wikipedia, email services, OpenStreetMap, Twitter, news sites, political forums, MOOCs. It's a chance to give the last billion people their voice on the open Internet.
Next billion, not last billion. http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm says that of the 7 billion people in the world, just shy of 2.5 billion have internet access. http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/ claims 3 billion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage claims about 3 billion.
All of which is to say that less than half the world actually has anything like consistent internet access today. And yes, getting those next 4 billion people on the internet is one of the explicit goals here.
The carriers include: Telefonica, DT, Telenor and more...
This is not a fly-by-night project, it has already launched in 14 countries.
What's your metric for success? Perhaps the Firefox OS teams metric is enable people to get a cheap smart-phone, period.
Down thread you say:
>targeting the lowest end of the market isn't a great idea unless you are trying to make money off the sale of the device alone and not ongoing services like apps //
And that works if you consider only ideas that make a profit to be valid. Perhaps they think that others will add to their project altruistically.
Mozilla give away their main product for free (albeit enabled in that as they're supported through advertising via Google).
Wikipedia is altruism on a large scale, but they aren't selling the consumer anything.
Cue: Google for "Mozilla is my dinossaur"
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Build/installable_a...
It was also said about UNIX, non-UNIX, x86 servers, and well, how many more iterations did we have? Oh, and I almost forgot abut Android.
As I've said elsewhere, I look forward to seeing how Mozilla makes this ecosystem thrive. My assumptions are that it needs a healthy economy, but I am not opposed to having that assumption turned on its head.
And yes, all those things survived because of an ecosystem of long term support and advice. If both phrases look at odd for you, you may need to take a look on how societies enriches itself.
Just need for the service provider to give ground breaking plans. Imagine having a flat data plan for $5/month at LTE speed with this type of smart phone.
Flat data plans are gone forever I'm afraid. We might get more data for less money over time but there is no way they are going back to unmetered data.
Last time I've used that plan it was 9 liras/3$ a month.
...by a factor of >100, which narrows down the use cases a lot. They don't completely turn off your internet, but they turn off >99%.