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Comment by zedr | Hacker News Reader

At this point, I think Mozilla really needs to: 1) launch a high end phone, capable of competing in specs with the Nexus 5 and the like; 2) release the first Firefox-OS tablet, which would be a prove very valuable to kiosks.

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FxOS tablets already exist [1]. The Flame and ZTE Open C are higher end devices than the device talked about in the OP. Not quite Nexus 5 level (more Nexus S I think?) but are mid-range.

I'd like to see more pushing the envelope of what HTML applications on mobile devices are capable of. Currently devices use the Facebook, Mobile and YouTube mobile sites. These don't make great use of HTML APIs. There is little in the way of offline support for example.

I'd like to see developers, or Mozilla, provide versions of these applications that are equivalent to native. I don't think there is much missing in the web platform to make this difficult.

[1] http://benjaminkerensa.com/2014/05/02/unboxing-first-firefox...

Firefox OS has a huge advantage when running on low-memory phones. The most memory intensive thing typically run on a low-end phone is the web browser. (Or an app that wraps a browser, like Facebook). So the ability to run a web browser is the limiting factor. Every other OS has to have enough memory to run a GUI + a browser. Since Firefox OS uses the browser for its GUI, it theoretically can run smoother in 128MB or 256MB of RAM than any mainstream smartphone OS. IMO, Firefox should concentrate on the areas where it's intrinsic advantages lie.

Ever heard of Series30, Series40 and Symbian mobiles?

Native apps + browser, best of both worlds.

i agree. I bought one of these (Intex) instead Nokia 109 and i regret the decision now. The phone is useless even for basic phone purpose. But hey i am now using twitter device. The battery come for about 4 hours with nay app running.

I did have the word "theoretical" in my post. An "Opera OS" phone could probably work with 64MB...

That doesn't seem to be the case at all according to the ArsTechnica review: 128MB cripples the phone to the point of near-useless.

The original iPhone had 128MB RAM.

The native apps on the original iPhone were incredible. The browser, not so much. Worlds better than the competition from 2007, but in 2014 you would certainly notice the extremely slow Javascript interpreter, the missing HTML5 capabilities, the missing phone API's, and the inability to hold more than one web page in memory simultaneously.

A 256MB RAM, in volume, would cost about $2.5-5 in volume. If that's the only difference between Android with 512MB(which is very usable) and FirfoxOS device, that doesn't sound like a lot.

Also opera/opera-mini offers much better performance on mobile than mobile firefox,and opera mini is very light on ram(maybe 30MB-40MB). So while i haven't tried, i wouldn't be surprised to learn that running opera mini on a 256MB android offers better performance than FirefoxOS.

What is the advantage of releasing a high-end phone?

They've made a sensible strategic choice to target a low-end market -- probably the place where firefox-os has the best chance of competing with Android. Trying to have a high-end flagship would dilute their branding and divert their dev efforts.

> What is the advantage of releasing a high-end phone?

Developers use high end phones.

Developers would be better off trying their apps on a $25 phone. Of course you might want to use a more powerful device for development, but the risk there is that low-end testing and code optimisation is left as a last minute step.

one of the nice things about their current position is that the hardware catches a lot of the blame for the overall experience. People expect next to nothing from these phones due to their price, and when they work better than was ever expected it looks favorable.

it may be in the interest of firefox-os to compete with the low-end market for the time being, where expectations are low, while polishing the OS for release on a high-end phone when high-end features are thought out.

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