Hacker News Reader

Comment by xanderstrike | Hacker News Reader

I've been using the Open C for a couple weeks now, and while it continues to surprise with how capable it is, it consistently seems to just barely scrape by on the hardware (512mb RAM, 1.2ghz dual core). I wonder what sorts of concessions had to be made to make this $33 phone a reality. Will it be all that different from symbian feature phone?

Either way, I'll be buying one when it goes up on ebay.

View on HN

From the top of my head: less animations, no autocorrect on the keyboard, quicker killing of applications, memory pressure events integrated in the built-in applications so they clear out stuff when needed.

More information can be found on the Tarako[1] info page at MDN. I saw the finished device (I have a dev version here with an old build) last week in Oslo and was surprised that it worked that well. Panning the homescreen had no jank and opening and closing apps was fairly fast.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/FirefoxOS/Tarako

That's right. On the graphics side if you drop the resolution of the screen you can drop a lot of memory and CPU power. Trading off features like pre-rendering (display port) on the newer builds will save you more memory and CPU cycles at the cost of waiting a bit of content to come in while scrolling.

Really it means that any time you fall off the well optimized paths you're going to notice it more. It mean being more careful with how the app are designed and which feature they use.

Of course content that really pushes the throughput like canvas games will be slower. But in those cases the browser's rendering pipeline (layout, style, visibility, display list) isn't running so you minimize the overhead there.

Speaking of eBay, I grabbed my Open C for $45 with "Make an Offer". I've since loaded 2.1 on it and couldn't be happier. That said, my smart phone expectations are not that of the iPhone / Samsung variety.

If you are not into spending the time compiling there is a very solid build on xda[1]. I needed to apply a font fix[2] when I tested it, so keep that in mind if your fonts look strange.

I'm curious about which things you felt "scraped by". I definitely felt that on my original ZTE Open, and I immediately updated my Open C to 2.1 so I'm not sure if 1.3 is the difference there.

One of the toughest things for this phone, in my opinion, is going to be websites that use a lot of memory.

[1] http://forum.xda-developers.com/firefox-os/general/zte-c-2-1... [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Developer_pho...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com