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Comment by nairteashop | Hacker News Reader

Just back from a trip to India (from there originally), and don't quite agree with you that data plans are expensive. There is a lot of competition, and both talk time and data are quite affordable IMO. I pre-paid for 1GB of data and ~4 hours of talk time for just 250 INR (about $4).

Pretty much everyone in India - rich or poor - has a mobile phone these days. However, unlike the service, phones cost just as much as they do elsewhere so the poor usually end up using crappy feature phones with limited data support. A $25 smartphone with full web support would make an incredible difference IMO.

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Well the poor don't necessarily end up with bad phones, there are a few indigenous phone manufacturers like Micromax [1], Maxx Mobile [2], Spice [3], Intex [4] etc. that have carved out a market for themselves in the past few years. These brands manufacture phones with features quite comparable to "good" smart phones and are comparatively very affordable. So, unless the consumer is brand conscious, its possible to get a smart phone with decent features and data support at affordable prices.

In fact, Spice and Intex are the manufacturers that Mozilla has partnered to produce the $25 smart phones.

[1] http://www.micromaxinfo.com/mobiles/smartphones [2] http://www.maxxmobile.in/mobiles/smart-phones [3] http://www.si2imobility.com/spicemobiles/ [4] http://www.intexmobile.in/Product.aspx?PCatId=3

You are forgetting about the cost of living and average income. While 250 INR ($4) is not that big an amount for you. Spending that much amount for just 1GB of 3G data may not be feasible/easy for a lot of people this phone is aimed at.

Like someone mentioned above, if you can afford the data plans, you would never go for this phone. The biggest hurdle I can see for this phone will be providing access to the internet.

Presumably, a thin client will transfer more data than a thick client. Potentially, making that cost significant.

Though maybe it has some clever caching system that reduces this?

I wouldn't call FirefoxOS a "thin client" (if that's what you meant) - it has a concept of "packaged apps" in which the app and all its assets are packaged and downloaded to the phone, and loaded from there. The built-in "certified" apps (like Phone, Music, Calendar and so on) don't require loading anything from the network at all, for instance.

You can think of FirefoxOS apps the same way conceptually you'd think of them on Android/iOS, except they are always written in open web technologies (HTML/JS/CSS).

App developers do have the option to provide "hosted" apps to the store (which is basically a regular web page but without browser chrome), however even in this case writing HTML5 apps that work offline is totally doable using existing cross-browser standards.

it really depends on the app developer. He can use packaged apps and go full offline or use HTML5 AppCache and go offline with annoyances :-)

In any way, the developer is in charge of how much bandwidth he uses.

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