
Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets - piokuc
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26316265
======
ChrisAntaki
Firefox OS runs very smoothly, when being simulated on the computer.

On the $70 ZTE phone, it's less than stellar, mainly because the phone has
issues registering touches. Also, there are some software bugs, like momentum
being saved when it should have decayed, after you lift your finger 5s later
in certain scrollable views.

If the newer phones have better touch screens, and the OS consistently gets
improved, especially on UI front, I could really see this succeeding and
taking a sizable market share.

Regardless, it'll change the game, and motivate Google & Apple to step up
their support for HTML as a platform. It's already happening, with Android
KitKat [1].

[1] [http://java.dzone.com/articles/android-44-kitkat-browser-
and](http://java.dzone.com/articles/android-44-kitkat-browser-and)

~~~
davb
Yes! I found exactly the same with my ZTE Firefox OS phone. The touch handling
was extremely poor. I had hoped it would be resolved in an OS update.

That said, I believe that even a slow Firefox OS phone that at least handles
touch interaction elegantly and responsively has a good chance of succeeding
in displacing feature phones in developing markets.

~~~
tracker1
That may not be the case... When I was using my original G1, it wasn't the
best interaction, and almost turned me off of Android. There were a few
features that I really liked (contacts sync being the biggest)... but after a
series of poor/middling experiences on tablets and phones... I managed to get
a closeout Touchpad and really liked the UI for that...

From there, a friend mentioned that a lot of the UI in the latest devices with
the untainted google experience had gone that direction in 4.x, I got a first
gen Nexus 7... loved it, from there was going to get a Nexus, but held out for
the Nexus 4. The first "smart" phone I actually liked... didn't wish it were a
little more responsive, or a little faster.

The down side, even now, technical difficulties persist. For some reason the
bluetooth doesn't sync to my car unless I turn it off, then back on... my last
phone (ZTE) was worse than the samsung I had before that, or my G1.

Most people wouldn't stick with this kind of experience if there's something
perceived to be better available. If the iPhone were available on a carrier
other than AT&T early on, I would have switched over from my G1.

Something tells me that poor experiences on cheap Firefox OS devices will only
lead to more Android and iOS adoption in those markets.

------
netcan
The OLPC story kind of makes me think that announcing and planning a
disruptive change when the disruption is mostly price based is a tricky
strategy.

I wonder if Firefox might find it easier to just pick up existing low end
android models and see if they can get a better experience with Firefox OS.

~~~
piokuc
The low price is crucial - it's about emerging markets. Think Africa, Asia,
South America.

~~~
ChrisAntaki
Definitely. I just hope they bring it to flagship phones as well. I could see
a lot of developers and open source advocates jumping on it. Especially if it
had granular permission controls, which I believe Google had to bail on for
backwards compatibility reasons [1].

[1] [http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/13/google-removes-apps-
ops-p...](http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/13/google-removes-apps-ops-
permission-manager/)

~~~
fidotron
The problem with flagship phones is the screens, which are high res enough
that GPU acceleration of the user interface is mandatory for decent
performance. Doing good enough GPU side rendering of web content is an
unsolved problem, and if your devs are having to worry about it (as many
mobile web devs already do) you've lost the point of using the web stack in
the first place.

~~~
ChrisAntaki
Sencha had some great results, with their FastBook project.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCn3R3-XxBU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCn3R3-XxBU)

~~~
camus2
so much great results they never open sourced that stuff... yeah ,like getting
great results in HTML/JS is easy...

------
Tloewald
I think this is a very promising development (OLPC anyone?) but Android is
cheerfully doing this organically:

"Looking at nice dual-core dual-SIM 3G Android for $30-40 wholesale. Quad-core
for $100-125. And increasingly hard to tell apart from premium" (tweet from
@BenedictEvans this morning).

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Why did Ben Evans suddenly discover, about three years too late, that Android
is open source and powering all kind of weird experiments? Is it to do with
his new job?

~~~
Tloewald
I think the point is that the market is cheerfully generating super cheap
Android phones without any help from the Mozilla foundation.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Yes, and that's a entirely fair observation, but he's been full of these
"amazing" stories about cheap android, and its use in developing nations for
the last few months. That didn't just happen, and he presumably knew about it
before, because that's his full-time job, so what changed?

~~~
Tloewald
I'm not trying to promote Benedict Evans as some kind of guru, merely quoting
him as a source of information (rather than pulling something out of my ass).
I usually find him reliable if not revelatory.

------
ck2
There is no way a phone that can run firefox os won't also be suitable for
android and visa versa.

And free OS is free OS ? How does either add to the cost of the phone?

Am I missing something?

Not that more competition is not a better thing, I mean I love my firefox
browser and only grudgingly use chrome.

~~~
Pxtl
I think the point is that Android has become quite resource-intensive an
performs very poorly on low-end devices. Firefox-OS is intended to be
_extremely_ light and to perform well on even the most anemic hardware.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
But how can a web browser be "extremely light" nowadays? It has to do all the
complex layout rendering and JavaScript execution of pages that have ~50MB
memory usage.

~~~
eli
Opera Mini made a lightweight mobile browser by offloading some of the
rendering and javascript to a proxy server.

~~~
camus2
which gives you some really fast offline apps... not.

------
fauigerzigerk
I'd love to see a Mozilla phone work in the market and I might buy one, but
I'm skeptical about the $25 price point for a phone that's based on a web
browser.

At the very least you need a battery that lets you actually use that browser
for more than 15 minutes. That's about $10. Now there's $15 left for a touch
display and a chipset and all the rest of it. That's very hard to imagine.

~~~
JTon
Yeah I agree. $25 is a mind blowingly low price point

------
CmonDev
I hope it doesn't work out. I would hate to live in a HTML-JS only future they
are trying to build. And please don't tell me about transpilation, because
it's crap.

~~~
rubiquity
Yes, because an Objective-C or Java only future is so much brighter!

~~~
CmonDev
That's not what I said. No single language future is better. Innovation
thrives when you give people options.

~~~
pekk
the web only provides Javascript, so locking us down to the web locks us down
to Javascript

------
keerthiko
This is really cool, but I doubt it'll do much to the market.

If the Firefox OS runs a browser brilliantly on this device, it might be a
disruptor in the more developed world actually. But I find it unlikely that a
low-cost smartphone with the level of power one can expect could do that (even
my Nexus5 still chokes on loading some pages, chews battery running the
browser, etc), so

> "You're talking about a clumsy smartphone that's a little bit better than a
> feature phone - still primarily for voice and text."

will probably remain true.

Keep in mind that the "rest of the world" on average still runs on 2G with
spotty 3G coverage, and uses little more of smartphone (or feature phone)
functionality than Whatsapp (because that's all that can effectively function
as intended on those networks).

The phone itself being cheaper does little to change their usage patterns: In
India, before the iOS/Android smartphone era (~2006), even middle class
schoolkids or the working class in oppressed areas who didn't have a solid
roof over their head still had Sony Ericsson Walkman phones ($200 then) and
Nokia N66s ($150-$300 over its lifetime). People like fancy phones in the
developing world, and lowering the price will make the tiniest of dents in
that space.

~~~
vidarh
> Keep in mind that the "rest of the world" on average still runs on 2G with
> spotty 3G coverage

That may be true, but it is changing rapidly. Ericsson, ZTE and Huawei are all
betting large on rapid 3G deployment throughout sub-Saharan Africa, for
example.

Even countries like Ethiopia is seeing the start of 4G deployments.

~~~
hiphopyo
Ethiopia is after all, one could argue, the most influential country in all of
Africa.

------
preemrust
I think more than a cheap phone they need a premium phone. A good looking,
high end camera packing phone that shows the best of the platform. I agree
with many who state here that Android is already doing well at the low end.
The sub 25 USD buyer finds such phones too complicated.

------
ape4
freedom [1] is a more important feature of this phone to me. I think other
brands will get to a low price but they'll never get the freedom.

[1] Not part of some mega company's mega cloud

------
malditojavi
Spain starting to be considered as an emerging country?

~~~
Raphael
I guess it submerged, so it will hopefully reemerge.

------
hiphopyo
Is this where Android / iOS devs start wishing they'd gone with HTML5 / JS
instead?

~~~
camus2
I hope so, that way there will be less devs on these Apple/Google stores,
script kiddies can go back toying with HTML5 on 25$ hansets for third world
countries while serious developpers get more clients from Europe/Northen
America with fast native apps on high end devices, A win-win ! Please move to
HTML5 quickly,trust me you'll love it.

~~~
_random_
Let's call it HTML5-phone or JS-phone from now on! Future consumers deserve to
know why it's slow and the apps are crappy.

