
$25 Smartphones on Firefox OS to Rock MWC - kryptiskt
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1321112
======
leeoniya
> "FireFox OS has less processing and memory requirements, since the OS and
> the services live mostly in the cloud. For example, most of the apps written
> for Firefox OS are written in HTML5 and can be run within a mobile browser."

this statement makes no sense. HTML/CSS/JS is not run "in the cloud" it is run
on your hardware.

what services exactly are run in the cloud? gps? phonebook? baseband? camera?
mic? wifi chip? the cpu scheduler?

i dont see anything running in the cloud that will significantly reduce
hardware requirements like Opera Mobile (maybe Mini, i forget) did with actual
server-side html/css/js processing and passing back a serialized image with
hit locations

~~~
daleharvey
It just doesnt make sense, Firefox OS doesnt do more 'in the cloud' than you
would expect.

~~~
thirsteh
Don't question the power of the cloud!

~~~
leeoniya
sometimes i wonder if many tech evangelists & PR people are so detached from
the technology they promote that they themselves don't understand what they
mean when they say "cloud". the unwashed masses clearly have no way of
understanding what "the cloud" is any more than "a series of tubes"

~~~
pavlov
I've noticed that a lot of people seem to think that "cloud servers" are
either located in space, or that smartphones at least use some kind of
satellite uplink to connect with "the cloud".

I think people are simply mixing up GPS with Internet-based services.

Anyway, it's pretty brilliant marketing for cloud companies. It's kind of
poetic to think of your data as being "somewhere up in the sky", light as air
-- sure beats the reality of thousands of hot, smelly data centers in
nondescript office buildings.

~~~
leeoniya
"Daddy, when I die, will I be up there with my data?"

::facepalm::

~~~
thirsteh
Well, to be fair, you can't entirely rule that out...

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4ad
I have seen a $80 Firefox OS phone. The ZTE Open. I think it was $80, maybe it
was 80EUR.

It's unusable. Completely unusable. I can't fathom how a $25 phone works.

~~~
asadotzler
We've made major strides since Firefox OS 1.0, but even with everything we
think we can do there, a $25 phone is not going to feel like what you're used
to. No one is claiming that it will.

To understand why that's OK, imagine that you gave up your hero phone and
spent a couple of years using a $50 feature phone over 2.5G. And then picked
up a Firefox OS smartphone for about $25 and compared them.

We can and will beat the feature phone experience for billions of people who
are or will soon be ready to make the leap from feature phones to smartphones
and who won't be served by the high cost of iOS and Android devices.

They will have access to a comfortable phone with real web browsing, popular
apps, an onscreen keyboard, cameras, notifications, etc, and if we're
effective, a great experience that's affordable enough to help them move to
this modern online era well before they otherwise might have.

While the big guys are fighting over upgrades for the 4th and 5th generation
smartphone users, we're figuring out how to get the next 4 billion people
online with their first smartphone.

Maybe we're crazy. I remember a lot of people telling us we were crazy to
think we could dethrone Microsoft's browser monopoly. I'm an optimist. I think
we're just crazy enough to pull it off. I think the world is counting on us.

~~~
Pacabel
Users in richer nations upgrading to newer generations of Android and iOS
devices has resulted in a huge number of used devices ending up in developing
nations. These devices are extremely inexpensive, yet still quite capable.

How are Firefox OS and these near-unusable devices supposed to compete with
the imported used Android and iOS devices that are far more capable?

When somebody in a developing nation can get a 2 or 3 year old device for $25,
and it runs Android or iOS, and it gives a pretty good experience, I just
don't see why they'd subject themselves to the comparatively poor experience
of a equivalently priced Firefox OS device that gives a worse experience.

And it wasn't Firefox that "dethroned Microsoft's browser monopoly". It was
very clearly Chrome's doing, thanks to the 40%+ share of the market it now
holds. Firefox played second fiddle, only ever capturing approximately 30% of
the market at its peak. With Firefox likely accounting for less than 20% of
all browser users today, it's even more apparent that Chrome is mostly
responsible for IE's loss of popularity.

~~~
nnethercote
Whoa. Let's not rewrite history. Firefox deserves all the credit it gets for
resurrecting browser competition in the 2000s. To "dethrone a monopoly" you
don't have to knock it down to less than 50% market share, you just need to
reduce it enough that the monopoly has to react to competition again.

~~~
camus2
Yet these experiments like Firefox Os are exactly the reason why Mozilla is
not what it used to be. And Firefox browser did not came out of the void
neither, it wouldnt have existed without Netscape.

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Thiz
I usually don't go mountain biking in an eighteen wheeler, so for casual web
browsing and data apps a basic phone with web capabilities might be enough.

So yes, there is a market for that too.

As a developer I say, bring it on.

~~~
wmf
As long as it's not slower than a J2ME feature phone.

~~~
camus2
My 2005 midlet phone runs arcade games that could not even run in a modern
mobile browser. Mind you,since J2ME is pretty limited, java midlets are
developped with these limitations in mind. modern HTML5 games are not
developped with crappy Firefox os performances in mind. That's the reason why
i dont believe in that javascript buzz driven product, it's just irrelevant.

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currywurst
_jaw drops_

Amazing work by the mozilla crew ! Running a JS-based environment on such
stingy hardware is audacious to begin with and awe-inspiring that they
consider it production ready ..

Eagerly waiting for reviews to understand what trade-offs went into getting a
$25 retail price.

~~~
Mikeb85
Unfortunately people will get angry when heavy jquery-based apps run like
shit. JavaScript is very quick, but the way people write and use it makes it
slow...

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daleharvey
Here is some slides from people working on getting Firefox OS on 128MB devices
- [http://www.codemud.net/~thinker/share/tarako-memshrink-
embed...](http://www.codemud.net/~thinker/share/tarako-memshrink-embed.svg)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I think that's the first non-demo example of an interactive SVG I've ever
seen. Shame; SVG is the perfect replacement for Flash.

~~~
chrismorgan
Inkscape allows you to create SVG presentations with JessyInk. And it works
with the browser's navigation history stuff.

An example of my own: [http://chrismorgan.info/blog/rust-docs-vision-
presentation.h...](http://chrismorgan.info/blog/rust-docs-vision-
presentation.html)

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ksec
Oh What.... 128MB of Ram, Are they serious? I wouldn't have doubt as much if
it was 256MB.

Many will end up buying the cheapest phone possible. And the experience will
be shite, which then damage the already not so good reputation of FireFox OS.
Despite being a Mozilla supporter and browsing the web with Firefox, Mozilla
has repeatedly time and time again just not care about user experience at all.

And the funny thing about all these report on New Firefox OS phone coming out,
none of them has pricing apart from this $25 dollar phone. Even the Reference
Design dont get a price either. How will Evangelist and enthusiast buy and get
one?

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yeukhon
> "FireFox OS has less processing and memory requirements, since the OS and
> the services live mostly in the cloud. For example, most of the apps written
> for Firefox OS are written in HTML5 and can be run within a mobile browser."

But then if you need to do very heavy computation, like photo editing,
wouldn't that require good GPU? Can $25 provide that? Also consider running
multiple webpages (try open tumblr on mobile) and multiple apps in the
background. I haven't never owned FxOS but I honestly think this statement is
for bare minimum flip-phone. If people have negative reviews for the one in
the market (ZTE Open, for example), how could a $25 beat the $79 one?

~~~
idlewan
I don't think you would do 'photoshop-style' heavy editing on mobile.
Instagram-like filters or crops run fine and don't need that much. It won't
add seconds to the processing if you use a low-grade $25 phone, it will
probably just add something like a few milliseconds.

The first sentence of the quote, however, is ridiculous. The OS doesn't "live
mostly in the cloud". The OS and default apps are installed on the phone and
don't need internet to run, they live on the phone. Web technologies != cloud.

I guess you can't expect technical details to be right when you're talking to
some non-technical guy ("Wayne Lam, senior analyst for consumer and
communications at IHS").

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Jare
Are there official specs anywhere? From the presentaiton slide [1] I
understand this phone to have 3GB of storage and a 2.6" screen at 480x320.
That seems just too little to be useful as a 'smart'phone. The data plan must
be really low price for this to be worth getting over a $100-$200 device (what
sort of prices are there in developing countries?).

[1]
[https://twitter.com/codepo8/status/437616415101976576](https://twitter.com/codepo8/status/437616415101976576)

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asb
I'm confused at the claims about low memory. Fennec had previously abandoned
256MiB devices:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=792131](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=792131).
Is Fennec not the core of Firefox OS? Does anyone know how much RAM this $25
phone has?

~~~
ianbicking
Underlying Firefox OS is B2G/boot-to-Gecko. That doesn't include any of the
Android app stuff that's in Fennec.

~~~
asb
Ok, I misunderstood the architecture. I thought Fennec was a retargetable
'mobile Firefox' core as opposed to Firefox for Android.

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jokoon
wow...

how is this really possible at all ?

I mean a $75 or $100 smartphone, I would be "yaay", but $25 ? Isn't this a
little too cheap ? How do you cut costs that much ?

~~~
another
The market passed "$75 or $100" a while ago.

$60 is where things are at now:

[http://orange.co.ke/smartphones_androids.html](http://orange.co.ke/smartphones_androids.html)

$40 or $50 is the frontier:

[http://www.pepstores.com/product/mtn-
steppa/](http://www.pepstores.com/product/mtn-steppa/)
[http://memeburn.com/2014/02/huaweis-sub-70-smartphone-
shows-...](http://memeburn.com/2014/02/huaweis-sub-70-smartphone-shows-
mtns-50-steppa-gambles-already-paying-off/)

$25 is the next wave.

~~~
tekni5
Can confirm bought a bunch of pre-paid Huawei Y300s for $50 ($56.50 total with
13% tax + $5 to unlock) on sale in Canada. Awesome Android phones for the
price.

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unsigner
1 GiB, aka 128 MB of RAM and Firefox?

On the Windows 7 machine I'm using to type this, Firefox uses 176 MB to show
the empty-ish Google home page.

~~~
Argorak
Firefox and Firefox OS are very different things.

Also, considering that desktop programs are usually optimized for speed and
not for memory consumption, I don't see the issue with 176MB?

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matznerd
But will it run WhatsApp?! ;)

~~~
idlewan
Try Loqui IM on the marketplace.

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Zigurd
Android can be built and configured to run on some very stingy hardware, like
800mhz single core SoCs. If this is a new SoC, it's probably at least that
fast.

~~~
asadotzler
Android's new floor is 512MB of RAM and that ain't happening in a $25 phone.
Firefox OS will run on 128MB, fitting into an entire category of phones that
modern versions of Android simply cannot.

~~~
hershel
Does this use the same code in standard firefox , or a different code base?

~~~
rhelmer
The underlying rendering engine (Gecko, FirefoxOS "Boots to Gecko" hence the
codename is "B2G") is the same - all apps (including the Browser app on the
phone) are written in HTML5/JS/CSS:
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G](https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G)

B2G is different than Desktop Firefox in some ways, for instance it uses
multiple processes (this is being worked on for Desktop, it's already in use
for plugins for instance) and supports some new APIs to access the hardware on
the phone that you'd expect:
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI](https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI)

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nikhilkmenon
Future possibilities - FirefoxOSCast like ChromeCast (under $35), Firefoxbook
like ChromeBook (under $100).

