
Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get? - vijayr
Anyone using firefox phone as your main phone? Do you like it?
Which phone would you recommend to get (assuming price is not an issue)?
======
soapdog
Don't go with ZTE Open, its the worst phone. Best advise wait for the new
models that are being released this year. If you don't want to wait you can
get the following models:

* Geeksphone Revolution - the most powerful phone but its running on a x86 architecture and the port is done by Geeksphone, even though they released three new updates already there are still bugs.

* Alcatel One Touch Fire - great phone and is unlockable with some exploits. Better than ZTE Open IMHO.

* LG Fireweb - better specs than the ZTE Open and Alcated OT Fire but its as locked as fort knox regarding the bootloader. You will not be able to flash your own device. If that is not a problem then its a great device.

* Geeksphone Peak - the second highest spec. Larger resolution than most retail devices and CPU but I think the battery drains too fast, I'd rather use Revolution.

* Geeksphone Keon - The standard developer phone for Firefox OS. Wonderful tiny device, the screen sux but the specs are better than the ZTE, Alcatel and LG.

My recommendation is to wait for the flame:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/Firefox_OS/Developer_pho...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/Firefox_OS/Developer_phone_guide/Flame)

I have all the phones above. My daily driver is the Geeksphone Revolution and
I've used the Fireweb and Alcatel daily before that. The Peak would drain too
fast.

Disclaimer: I am a Mozilla Rep and member of the Brazilian Firefox OS Launch
Team. If you're interested in developing apps for Firefox OS I've authored a
free and open book about it available at:

[http://leanpub.com/quickguidefirefoxosdevelopment/](http://leanpub.com/quickguidefirefoxosdevelopment/)

I will hang around this topic if anyone has questions.

;-)

~~~
blazespin
If you are a Mozilla rep, you probably want to delete this post or at least
remove your overtly critical language. Hardware manufactures invest a lot of
resources trying to build for your platform. They are your customer. Insulting
them is not good business..

~~~
blazespin
Lol, down voted. Weak, HN, very very weak. This guy could lose his position
over that post and I was just trying to help him (maybe it's just a volunteer
thing, though).

If he was at our company, he would have been fired in a heartbeat. Publicly
insulting partners like that? Yikes..

~~~
jgraham
FWIW Mozilla reps generally aren't employees, but are part of the wider
Mozilla community [1].

[1] [https://reps.mozilla.org/](https://reps.mozilla.org/)

------
gcb0
Most people here are giving suggestions without owning any Firefox phone.

I actually bought one when i was in Mexico. I tried to see them but even
finding one to buy is difficult. See in mx and most other countries without
heavy regulation, telefonica from Spain owns the market. And usually they have
a shell company as competitor to avoid a mother bell like monopoly. In Mexico
the shell company is movistar, the one that sells Firefox phones. Now, they
spent millions advertising it. But any store i entered i was told they,never
had it for sale. after 20 days and more than 50 stores i finally found one in
the shady downtown area were you can buy most imported electronics without
tax... The store was inside a parking lot, had 4 full time employees and had a
total of 5 phones that they could sell (if that's not the point of sale of a
shell company i don't know what it is) but one of the phone was a touch fire.
So i bought it.

it was ffos almost stock, albeit and older version, there is zero new features
from 1.1 to the bleeding edge 1.4... One nicety was offline gps app right out
of the box. That beats any ios or Android phone.

Now for using the phone.. It's impossible because it is slow and crash all the
time.

The only reason anyone would use one as their main phone is if said someone
already compiled the emulator and wrote all the applications he thinks he will
write when getting the phone. Until you do that, avoid getting the phone. I
use mine just to see how slow a site with too much js would be

~~~
soapdog
Hey, there are LOTS of new features from 1.1 to 1.4. Heck there are new APIs
available, advancements to all the rendering stuff...

I am a mobile app developer. I have all platforms in here and I use Firefox OS
as my daily driver. I get angry sometimes and things do not work as expected
or when I see a bug but dogfooding is a great way to recognize points where
you need to improve and then work on it.

I haven't seen a FXOS phone crashing all the time. They can be perceived as
slow if you're used to high end devices but their performance still great when
compared to entry level device.

Also Movistar is not a shell company. Its present in many countries in South
America. Telefonica owns many telcos such as Movistar and VIVO.

I have some Alcatel phones in here, most of them running 1.1 and one running a
nightly build of 1.3. They are working as expected and they used to cost USD
75 here for a while at the same time the cheapest Android was USD 150.

But as I said above, there are still features needed and believe me 1.3 is
much better than 1.1 regarding performance. I hope with the new devices and
new OS we can make a better impression on you. As for 1.1 on that device, lots
of people migrated from their feature phones and are pretty happy with the
purchase.

~~~
gcb0
yes, the rendering stuff is nice. i agree wholeheartedly... i'm using 1.4 on
that phone since i got it, btw.

but for daily use, there is absolutely nothing new that deserves mention.

------
chimeracoder
I have the ZTE phone to play around with - I got it this past fall just for
kicks. It's a great phone for the price, but that's also a very low price
point.

FirefoxOS is 'ready' for prime time use if and only if you have relatively low
requirements of your phone. It can do most basic tasks by virtue of the fact
that it uses mobile websites as if they were native apps, but the experience
is not yet comparable to Android.

I think it will get there soon, but right now I would only get one if you are
very comfortable being an incredibly early adopter, and understand what kind
of adjustment that requires on your part.

~~~
ehPReth
Have you upgraded it past the initial build? If so, how far have you gotten?

~~~
WhiteDawn
I personally have been able to get it all the way up to 1.4 on my ZTE Open.
It's a mess to do, you need to build the OS from source then splice it into
the boot file provided by ZTE and edit some init scripts. It runs perfectly
fine after that but I can't comment on stability since I only use it for app
testing

------
____miah
I've been using ZTE Open as my main phone for almost 2 months now. The cost
isn't very high, but it does typical phone stuff. I've upgraded my FirefoxOS
to 1.1 from the original 1.0. I also tried using 1.2 but there was a problem
with the virtual keyboard where the keys doesn't adjust to lowercase so I
reverted. ZTE Open doesn't have a really good hardware, but you get what
you've paid for. It's really good for browsing the web, but doesn't do good
with pages that have really heavy JavaScript.

Apps are pretty much limited, but it's a pretty new platform so we'll just
have to wait (or code it ourselves). I don't usually erase SMS and I think it
causes a bit of a lag when having tons of messages in your inbox. There will
be a slight delay when creating messages if that is the case.

Calls are pretty decent, sometimes though, there's no sound in a call and have
to stop the call and redial. I'm not sure if it's because of network problems
or because of the phone.

There's this feature about sound issue in FFOS, where it "cares" when you've
been listening in full volume and using earphones and automatically turns the
volume down. I don't like it pretty much, but it's neat.

Also, there's still no copy-paste in FFOS 1.1.

All in all, I'm still using my ZTE Open, it's does the basic stuff but it
might not suit you if you're used to IPhone and Android phones. I haven't
tried other FFOS devices but if I were you, you can hold it for a while and
wait for new devices to be released.

------
windsurfer
There are no high-powered phones yet. You may quickly get frustrated trying to
use the existing devices as your main phone.

I have the geeksphone version with the resistive touch screen, and it isn't a
fun experience (yet). I would suggest waiting a while.

------
AndrewDucker
It's a shame there isn't a "Firefox OS" app for Android, that basically acts
as if it _was_ the OS for the phone.

That way you could try it out without having to throw away your existing
install/apps. There's no reason it couldn't be installed as the launcher, and
take over running everything on the phone. I assume that that would be a fair
amount of extra work though.

~~~
kbrosnan
This really is not trivial. Firefox OS runs on the same fork of Linux as
Android but does not have any of the Dalvik bits.

There is Firefox for Android, you can go to
[https://marketplace.firefox.com](https://marketplace.firefox.com) to test
most apps. There are some apps that only specify manifests for Firefox OS.

The everything.me launcher may provide some of the look and feel of Firefox
OS. [http://blog.everything.me/2014/02/06/mozilla-and-
everythingm...](http://blog.everything.me/2014/02/06/mozilla-and-everythingme-
announce-firefox-launcher-at-incontext-2014/)

~~~
fabrice_d
Actually we could do it, it's basically "just" loading gaia's system app
packaged for android web runtime. That would still need quite some work as we
don't have yet feature parity on some api support. That sounds like a cool
contributor project that could be mentored.

------
abrowne
I have a Geeksphone Keon as my main/only phone. It's not the fastest phone,
but fine for my fairly light use, but I think it does have more RAM than the
first-gen retail FxOS phones (e.g. ZTE Open). I don't think I'd get one of
those to use as my main device.

Geeksphone provides nightly builds, and I upgraded to FxOS 1.3 about a month
ago. It's been stable for and a nice upgrade from 1.1.

I'm watching/waiting for 2nd gen devices before I'll upgrade. I think these
will launch with at least FxOS 1.3. Some that I noted from MWC are the ZTE
Open C and Alcatel One Touch Fire S. (These are the smaller-sized phones I'm
more interested in, but there are others.) I don't think these devices have
been released yet.

Mozilla's reference device, the Firefox OS Flame, is supposed to be coming out
soon too.

[edit: added note on nightly builds.]

------
arjunbajaj
I'm using ZTE Open as my only phone for around 5 months now. It works for me.
I have upgraded a few times, though you have to download a lot of git repos to
compile the latest builds. Compiling the build takes a lot of time too. I'm
running on version 1.3.

It's a good phone, enough for my needs. Sometimes background apps crash when
you are using something else. This is an issue if you are listening to music
while reading HN... If you use a single app at one time it works great. The
phone cannot handle pages with a lot of data or JS.

ZTE Open is a good phone if your needs are low. Otherwise check out the other
phones out there...

------
samastur
I have Geeksphone's Keon which is fine if your needs are not too ambitious.
I'm very happy with it but it has obvious limitations so not everyone would
be. App selection is not great (but happens to be fine for me) and UI can be a
bit unresponsive (you need to wait for transitions to play out). Some of this
problems would probably disappear with a more expensive phone, but others
wouldn't (e.g. the dialer app would still be a bit crap). Cheap phone also has
a benefit of anchoring your expectations appropriately.

Still, I do like my phone a lot.

Geeksphone now sells Revolution which is not that expensive, reasonably
featureful and can run both Android and FirefoxOS. I have no experience with
it, but if I had to buy a FirefoxOS phone today, it would probably be this
one.

------
bwanab
ZTE Open.

The good: cheap, it tethers very nicely. The bad: almost everything else.

I gave my android phone to my son when I decided to try FFOS as my only phone
on the ZTE open. The hardware isn't good enough and it often lags. I can live
with it since I almost always have my tablet which is wifi only.

My biggest concern is that Mozilla hasn't done a good job of providing an
update path. I can live without OTA updates, but I'm not going to spend the
time hunting in random websites for builds that have vague instructions to
update my phone.

~~~
fabrice_d
We are working on fixing the update situation, see
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.b2g/2pnA...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.b2g/2pnAP8i92Pg)

Look at the push back I got from some people... but things will happen!

------
Thiz
Guys, guys, one question…

Can I build apps for FirefoxOS without owning a phone? I mean just html/js/css
using an editor and testing it on an emulator. That's the way I do android
apps and I don't have a phone.

Can I? Can I?

I believe Firefox OS and html based apps are the future. I want to start
building it now.

~~~
jgraham
Yes, there's a simulator that you can run on your desktop computer. See [1]
for instructions on installing it.

[1] [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-set-firefox-os-
desk...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-set-firefox-os-desktop-
build)

------
chintan39
How about installing Firefox OS on an existing android phone or dual
booting?Possible?

------
st3fan
Wait until the Flame is available. It will be the reference device.

------
zobzu
i like the geekphones but the flame is far better

