This is exciting as hell. Not because I will use this device (I won't, but I will buy to play with like I do Android phones). But it excites me so much because:
1) mobile is an important space (free protip!) — both in terms of software and business, and in terms of just living your life with your family and friends in the modern age
2) this is the kind of competition that is needed in this space
I don't use the Firefox browser very often in modern times, but I witnessed it's whole evolution. If it didn't exist, I don't think Apple and Google would have made these awesome Firefox-killers. They would have made MSIE-killers and the world today wouldn't be as awesome as it is for desktop browsers.
The still-in-its-infancy world of mobile mostly sucks today, because you have only two significant players controlling it.
One of them is a monomaniacal control-freak that won't even let you change your default browser, and demands that you pretend we live in a sparkling antiseptic world where there are no messy things like bittorrent or porn or (gasp!) programming software directly on your mobile device.
The other player is like this sort of Orwell-meets-Disney-City player, giving you free email (that it reads) and all sorts of free services (that let it track where you are, who you talk to, what you buy...). Not Big Brother, but more like Big Creepy Uncle, who seems nice but always wants to take pictures of you that make you feel uncomfortable afterwards.
Android is sort of open but the open/rooted version of it doesn't really compete with itself very much.
Competition between three players is always better than two. But when one of them is a legitimate free open source player, it is much better.
Think about a computer user who has never used Linux once. Just Windows and Mac. Even that person has had their computing life massively enriched by the existence of Linux, and the influence that its existence has had on the platforms that person does use.
We don't have that third player on mobile yet, which is keeping us in the cave man era. It seems increasingly like Firefox OS is really going to become that player.
1) mobile is an important space (free protip!) — both in terms of software and business, and in terms of just living your life with your family and friends in the modern age
2) this is the kind of competition that is needed in this space
I don't use the Firefox browser very often in modern times, but I witnessed it's whole evolution. If it didn't exist, I don't think Apple and Google would have made these awesome Firefox-killers. They would have made MSIE-killers and the world today wouldn't be as awesome as it is for desktop browsers.
The still-in-its-infancy world of mobile mostly sucks today, because you have only two significant players controlling it.
One of them is a monomaniacal control-freak that won't even let you change your default browser, and demands that you pretend we live in a sparkling antiseptic world where there are no messy things like bittorrent or porn or (gasp!) programming software directly on your mobile device.
The other player is like this sort of Orwell-meets-Disney-City player, giving you free email (that it reads) and all sorts of free services (that let it track where you are, who you talk to, what you buy...). Not Big Brother, but more like Big Creepy Uncle, who seems nice but always wants to take pictures of you that make you feel uncomfortable afterwards.
Android is sort of open but the open/rooted version of it doesn't really compete with itself very much.
Competition between three players is always better than two. But when one of them is a legitimate free open source player, it is much better.
Think about a computer user who has never used Linux once. Just Windows and Mac. Even that person has had their computing life massively enriched by the existence of Linux, and the influence that its existence has had on the platforms that person does use.
We don't have that third player on mobile yet, which is keeping us in the cave man era. It seems increasingly like Firefox OS is really going to become that player.