Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat 205
mattydread23 writes with an opinion piece naming a few reasons Firefox OS is likely to succeed "It's geared toward low-powered hardware in a way that Google doesn't care as much about with Android, it's cheap enough for the pre-paid phones that are much more common than post-paid in developing countries, and most important, there are still 3.5 billion people in the world who have feature phones and for whom this will be an amazing upgrade."
I'd push greater commitment to keeping the essential components of the system under FOSS licenses onto the head of that list.
Firefox OS is great... (Score:4, Funny)
But it needs a web browser. Does it run Chrome?
Re: they see me trollin... they hatin' (Score:4, Funny)
Reminds me of my favorite UNIX joke:
Emacs would be great operating system if someone just wrote a decent text editor for it.
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Just for kicks, I booted into Emacs once (init=/usr/bin/emacs in GRUB) - it works, but it's weird...
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Actually, the fact that it runs firefox is interesting: it'll help keep the browser market heteregenous, which is what's best for both devs and users in the long run. We don't need another browser dominating the market just like IE did: it gives them too much power.
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"We don't need another browser dominating the market just like IE did: it gives them too much power."
I certainly agree with THAT.
But who's going to take on Intel today? We need competition there, too. The entire world is not yet mobile, nor should it be.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Then again, what do I care about web devs...
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Actually, I heared Firefox on Android is the highest rated browser in the Google Play appstore.
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1.3 build is f'ing awesome. Most of the problems with have been fixed. This is coming from somebody who was extremely critical of it (even though excited initially because of its freedom aspects). After 1.2 and finally 1.3 (on the ZTE open) it actually works pretty well. I'm not this person. I think 1.0 release with ZTE open (I have this version, haven't tried 1.3... which is like a beta release or not even) worked OK, but it definitely has some early-adopter type issues. Lack of apps (not that I'm a big ap
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
The entire premise of this article seems to revolve around the unsubstantiated claim that Android is poorly optimized for low-end devices. I disagree with that claim, so the entire premise of the article seems suspect to me.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Funny)
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Cramming a data plan onto a voice SIM (Score:5, Insightful)
Excellent point. (Score:2)
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AT&T has wifi only and low data plans on GoPhone prepaid for Smartphones.
The words "wifi" and "ethernet" do not appear on that page.
If you're doing wifi-only, get yourself a static IP, run asterisk, use any old cellphone with SIP support and wifi and skip AT&T, as they are fuckers of the highest degree. Their prices are beyond fucking ridiculous. They want $50/mo for a land line. I got SIP for about ten bucks a month. My Xperia Play is now our cordless phone, and it's also a neato clock. My server is a $20 pogoplug, but in fairness I bought two of them so I could do HA.
Voice out of the house (Score:2)
If you're doing wifi-only [...] use [...] SIP
That might work for people who make and receive calls only at home. Am I the only one who needs voice but not data while riding transit?
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That might work for people who make and receive calls only at home. Am I the only one who needs voice but not data while riding transit?
I don't know, I have no idea why anyone would bring up a wifi-only plan in the first place. In any case, many buses now have wifi on them.
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You'll find it on buses and trains in a lot of European cities.
But not in Stockholm, which I think is a bit odd.
OTOH, cheap plans with ample mobile data are readily available here, and even if you can't always get 3G the bandwidth is still pretty good, even in the subway--they apparently have repeaters installed in the tunnels.
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You forgot to account for the time of a competent admin that can
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$50/mo for a landline is stupid, but make a fair comparison -- you can't rate a system that requires a /.er to design and set up against one that a person with an IQ of room temperature can use.
You can use freepbx which makes asterisk fairly simple, and use a carrier like flowroute who will provide you all necessary config info. You can even buy a device from most SIP providers which you can hook your POTS phones up to, if you don't want to think. I have a rtp300, but I'm having problems with it. But I also have a PoE SIP phone and some android phones, which have pretty good SIP support.
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You can use freepbx which makes asterisk fairly simple, and use a carrier like flowroute who will provide you all necessary config info. You can even buy a device from most SIP providers which you can hook your POTS phones up to, if you don't want to think. I have a rtp300, but I'm having problems with it. But I also have a PoE SIP phone and some android phones, which have pretty good SIP support.
You're either making a joke or have never delt with "normals" much.
I count probably a dozen words in that sentence that would make a normal's eyes glaze over.
There is no way the average person is going to do that. To give you one example, my dad
called me once because all his applications disappeared. Come to find out he had maximized
a program. Once I showed him how to hit the X to close the window he was fine.
Most normals I know can't or are at least too scared to hook up a computer. They have even
been
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You showed him how to close, but not how to resize or to minimise?
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Indeed, which brings me to the other thing I see 'wrong' with the article (or at least the summary) - the statement "it's cheap enough for the pre-paid phones that are much more common than post-paid".
Outside the US (not just in third-world countries, but most other developed countries), this is a false dichotomy (suggesting that only 'cheap' phones can be put on pre-paid plans). Many people with 'high end' phones (Galaxy S4, iPhone 5/5S) are on pre-paid plans. Often quite cheap ones. Actually I'd say that'
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I guess it's because I left the States before mobiles really took off, but it wasn't until a trip back a couple of years ago that I started to understand the situation--the telcos have done a very good job of enforcing an integrated-vertical/everything-as-a-service model there.
But that's not how it works here (Stockholm). I do happen to have a subscription, basically because it's more convenient and I get a free phone every 2 years for signing up again. But it is entirely possible for you to get a late-mode
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and more to the point (Score:2)
I'm as guilty as the last review-fixated whore in obsessing over the specs of my current and potential future phones - but with the last gen I've hit a realization.
A 1080 screen is more than enough. My CPU and GPU are absolutely fine to run anything I need. Personally (HTC One) I'd *like* to know I could crunch a benchmark faster for my geek pride - but I can't for the life of me see how any phone upgrade costing me £500+ (less ebaying of my old h
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yesterday's hardware does what 99% of end users want.
When the hardware gets good enough, we won't need carriers. That's something to look forward to.
Reminds me, I haven't looked in on Serval lately. Last I checked power consumption was one of the major blockers...
http://www.servalproject.org/ [servalproject.org]
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"Android runs very well on low spec hardware. Plus the low end phones of today were yesterday"s high-end!"
But Android runs better on low spec hardware the more you take Google out of it. (See CyanogenMod and Carbon.)
I think that's part of it. The more corporate lock-in and advertising stuff you have to put up with, the less well your hardware performs.
The next big issue is security. While Google gives lip-service to taking it seriously, Android is wanting in several areas.
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This is known and has been for a while... how many complaints on /. have there been about all the trial versions, general crapware, etc. that comes preinstalled on most factory systems?
Even at that, both Uberoid and cyanogen both have some extra apps I'll never use that I'd like to get rid of... but using the devices they are on (wm8650 based netbook and a nook color) is low priority to me, so I usually just put it off until later.
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Of course it all depends what you mean by low-end devices. You could both be right, but simply have a different level of devices in mind.
However, if Firefox OS were really designed for low-end devices, it would be using a lower level language than HTML5 and Javascript for apps.
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It seems to work just fine. I have a ZTE Open -- which makes low-end phones look futuristic -- running FFOS. There are some pretty impressive games that run just fine on that antique hardware. Asteroid Mania is my go-to example, as it's the only (I think?) 3d game on the platform. It's not something you'd expect would work well in HTML5, let alone on a seriously low-end phone.
Yeah, I know all the JS sucks memes, but it should be obvious by that that they're simply not true.
Unrelated, but I feel the ne
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ZTE Open is about the same as an iPhone 3GS. Although it has a 1GHz processor compared with the 600MHz of the 3GS.
Now low end, but not as low as the 3rd world devices they talk about.
And from the photos, Asteroid Mania looks very limited. Like a game from the 1990s.
This whole thing reminds me of all the folks complaining about how old BB apps were all Java while praising Android.
I wasn't really party to that discussion. But for sure Java bytecode seriously outpaces Javascript.
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I wasn't commenting on the game, but the tech. It's a fast-paced full 3d game with dynamic lighting. That was the point. JS is not a serious limitation to apps and games on the platform.
I'm sure that, if we wait long enough, an example more to your liking will pop up in the marketplace.
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I can't comment on the game, as I can't play it. But from the photos, it look like a very small number of polygons, set in outer space. This is the kind of 3D we had in the early 1990s. Modern phones on the other hand are running modern 3D game engines, within full 3D environments with thousands of polys.
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Do you remember the early 90's? Doom, Dark Forces, etc.? I don't recall dynamic lighting in any of the Wing Commander games -- or full-screen action for that matter.
This isn't an argument worth having. Believe what you want about the game, my point was that the tech isn't nearly as limited as people assume. What I can say is that early 2000's type games are very easily doable on crummy hardware in FFOS. You mentioned the 3GS earlier. A popular game from that era, like Wolfenstein RPG, is well within t
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Regarding megahertz, ZTE's phone has a Cortex-A5; a chip not optimised for speed.
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Which Android phones run on 128MB or 256MB? (Score:2)
Which phones with 128MB or 256MB of RAM run a modern version of Android?
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Firefox OS doesn't run on phones with 128MB either, and Android launched on less RAM than Firefox OS requires. Nothing says a low-end device has to use the full stock Google experience; you can target the OS for lower memory devices.
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Android launched on less RAM but the bare minimum, according to wikipedia, is 340MB and recommended minimum is 512MB. That's after Google did a clean-up, specifically to make KitKat less bloated than ICS.
Mozilla are actively working on Tarako to slim down to 128MB.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
The entire premise of this article seems to revolve around the unsubstantiated claim that Android is poorly optimized for low-end devices. I disagree with that claim, so the entire premise of the article seems suspect to me.
Android requires OpenGL ES, both in the 1.0 and 2.0 flavors. For devices in developing countries, that's a very high bar.
That's also not a knock against Android. For higher end devices that's a very sensible requirement. But just looking at the minimum requirements, it's not compatible with low end in the developing world.
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Open GL ES is a core requirement of 'Gonk', the UI layer of FF OS.
Mozilla borrows from the Android project for its device drivers, IIRC.
Any 'developing world' SoC mass produced in 2014 for the $25 smartphone market will include a GPU capable of running it.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
Kitkat has a minimum RAM requirement of 340MB.
Prototype developer hardware, such as the ZTE Open, has 256MB. Mozilla are investigating running FFOS with 128MB.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen this before though and this is the same wheel that everyone goes through.
"Look we got our system to run with 50% less memory!"
"Ok, so we sacrificed all of the features people expect these days, and in the last 3 years prices have dropped sufficiently that our product is no longer needed, but just wait for our next version!"
The better approach is to tackle low end devices like Microsoft and Google are already doing (And WP8 runs very well on low end systems) but not let it be your driving focus. Because inevitably what's a "high end" phone today will be a $5 prepaid phone in 3 years.
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so it works on low end hardware as long as you never do a system upgrade
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That's certainly my situation. Fortunately there were no irreversible upgrades, unlike the AC. But I'm pretty much forced to cancel all attempted updates because the phone won't handle them. (Mainly memory. I don't have enough on-phone memory to run just the raw OS (and vendor shit) once I accept upgrades. I freed up over a third of my memory by rolling back upgrades of the core Google apps.) Thankfully they clearly separate security upgrades from brand-upgrades. Oh wait, no, they don't.
[The phone's still u
Lack of innovation on the low-end (Score:2)
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It's no secret that innovation in the low-end of the market is high on the priority of manufacturers.
Because everyone wants to compete in the booming low-margin Blackberry/Nokia feature phone market?
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You're in luck. The Nexus S is a 'tier 2' device that Mozilla staff used as a development target:
https://developer.mozilla.org/... [mozilla.org]
Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat (Score:4, Insightful)
Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat
Flamebait and hopelessly wrong.
Re:Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat (Score:5, Funny)
Of course Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat. Also, 2014 will be the year of Linux on the desktop.
Re:Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat (Score:5, Funny)
Didn't you get the memo? With the announcement of SteamOS, the "Year of the Linux Desktop" has been moved to 2015 (Valve Time, so maybe 2016 or 2017). Of course the "desktop" has also been moved to the livingroom, so plan accordingly.
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1999 was the year of Linux on my Desktop. I could give a shit about everybody else desktops.
Re:Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat (Score:4, Interesting)
Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat
Flamebait and hopelessly wrong.
I wouldn't go that far. Its entirely possible that Firefox OS could become a major player in the market segment the article indicates. The problem is that saying "...will become the Mobile OS to Beat" implies the major players like Android, iOS, and Windows even want to win that game in the first place. Absolutely there are lots of people who cannot afford the top of the line smartphones out there, and it would be nice if someone serviced their needs, but the problem is time. In time, technology will improve and costs will continue to drop relative to computing power. Its very dangerous to target a market Moore's Law is scheduled to destroy.
For Firefox OS to be the mobile OS "to beat" requires a lot of things to happen that aren't trivial exercises. First, Firefox OS has to become the dominant player in the low end market. Second, it has to achieve a level of brand loyalty comparable to iOS and significantly higher than Android itself (Android users are typically more loyal to their smartphone manufacturer than the operating system itself in my experience). It then has to be able to parlay that brand loyalty into a way to maintain their hold on those users as the smartphone industry advances to the point where the $20 phone of tomorrow is the $600 phone of today. And it must do this in a way that doesn't give the major players an easy way to encompass Firefox's feature set: if FirefoxOS's major innovations are based on open standards and HTML5 applications, anything it can do today Android and iOS could easily do tomorrow if they wanted to.
So much has to go right besides "sell a lot of low end feature phones" that to me it would be like predicting that the company that supplies most of the paper to print air travel tickets in kiosks was a threat to take over the entire travel industry in a decade.
The plan costs more for a smartphone (Score:3)
Absolutely there are lots of people who cannot afford the top of the line smartphones out there
There are also people who can afford the phone but not the plan. Virgin Mobile, for instance, charges $336 per year more for service on an Android phone than for service on a dumbphone. I can keep service on a dumbphone for $7 per month, but if I wanted to activate an Android phone, that'd cost no less than $35 per month. Wouldn't carriers lump Firefox OS with the smartphones that require a data plan even if the subscriber plans to use only Wi-Fi data?
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Keep in mind that the median worldwide household income is under $10K/yr...
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Lots of countries have laws that prohibit carriers from differentiating the pricing based on phone model or have carriers who aren't crooked enough that they'd want to do something like that, so the data plan for a smartphone is not necessarily going to be more expensive if you already have a data plan for your feature phone.
A minimal 100MB data plan is probably only a dollar or two in many low income countries, so it's no big deal.
Not worth leaving the US, I assume (Score:2)
Lots of countries have laws that prohibit carriers from differentiating the pricing based on phone model
But how easy is it for a citizen of Dice's home country to get a work visa in those countries?
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$336/12 months per year is $28 a month.
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Yes, FirefoxOS is trying to slip in thought a closing window. But it's a a large window. You have to remember more than half of the installed base are still feature phones and still being sold today.
I wouldn't mind if they pull it off.
hmmm... (Score:2)
"While there are now for the first time over a billion smartphones in use around the world -- a staggering number -- Ericsson estimates that there's an astonishing 4.5 billion people who own mobile phones. For those who paid attention in math class, that's 4.5 times as many."
huh??
firstly, the ratio is hardly needed to make the point...pretty sure everyone knows that 4.5 billion is alot more then 1 billion.
plus, i think the pointless math lesson would probably be more necessary for those who *didn't* pay att
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Actually, while its had for people to grasp a market of a billion people, its even more staggeringly harder to grasp the idea of a non-market of 3.5 billion people.
Ode to feature phones (Score:4, Insightful)
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The mobile war is over, Andorid has won (Score:5, Insightful)
It's over. Android has won. The iPhone will stay around with a significant market share. But current high specs for phones will be the low end in three years. 2GB Ram and a 1.5 Ghz Quad Core CPU with be in entry level Android devices in 2017. Enough to run Android any way you like.
Android already runs on so many phones. It already is ubiquitous. Microsoft might have a chance in a niche. Same as Firefox, if it comes down to it. The mobile phone market is a billion device market. Why not a couple thousand Windows or Firefox or Jolla or Tizen devices? Or Ubuntu for that matter.
Android already runs on low spec cheap entry level devices. Granted, it doesn't run them very well, but neither does Firefox atm.
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Really ? In a market of 4.5 billion phones and 1 billion are smartphones ? That still leaves a large part of the world phones not running Android.
And FirefoxOS is focussing on making it run well on cheap hardware, instead of focussing on other things.
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Android runs just fine on cheap hardware that's the false premise of the article. There are plenty of feature phones still out there are are dying and on the way out. Just because they are feature phones doesn't mean that Android won't be their next upgrade, and hence the parent comment that Android has won.
The Samsung Galaxy Ace comes in on the most basic of plans and the only way to get a cheaper phone right now is to buy your own phone after market and get just the sim card. Even shopping after market th
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But that does not mean that a new contender cannot do well. With so many apps made for android, nothing it going to knock it out of the mobile market soon, but it is a crappy enough operation system to allow good ones room to compete against its and Apples monopoly.
Re: The mobile war is over, Andorid has won (Score:3)
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FOSS? Who cares? (Score:3)
I'd push greater commitment to keeping the essential components of the system under FOSS licenses onto the head of that list.
If this really can work for ~3.5 billion people who currently don't have a decent mobile OS (a claim about which I remain skeptical), I guarantee you that at least 3.49 billion of them won't give a damn whether its FOSS or not. Of the remainder, most surely won't care whether its GPL, BSD, or PirateBay licensed.
The same was said of Firefox for Desktop... (Score:2)
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But the story with browsers is completely different. They are not marketing Firefox OS to consumers to load on to their existing phones - they are marketing it towards phones which come pre-loaded with the OS, more akin to Macintosh on the PC side - though at the far low end. Maybe Chromebook is a better example, and that is doing nicely at the moment.
It wil be the best.... (Score:2)
And it will become the year of the Linux desktop....
And the Hurd will ship...
Wasn't KitKat designed for lighter footprint on smaller devices? They're not abandoning the low end. Also, computing history is littered with corpses of companies that tried to optimize for current hardware, but spent so much time/money that the hardware caught up to "bloated" software, and they were beat.
Meh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Just for reading the summary I can say this looks fishy. The latest Anroid release 4.4 was mainly dedicated to make Android run on smaller devices, adding tools to debug memory footprint, adding compresion of pages, sharing of things, etc. Google claims that now Android can run on a 512 MB device (which is fairly low end right now). And with ever decreasing memory prices is hard to imagine there's a place for a "lower than lower end" OS.
The "being open" reason is also not good enough. As a technology (i.e. removing Google services) Android is 100% free software. And the reason some telcos might want Firefox OS is to have a more closed environment which they can control.
Maybe Firefox could have been working to create its own Android fork, replacing Google service with Firefox services. That would be, IMO, much cooler.
What do they want? (Score:3)
You can easily buy a pre-paid Android phone for $40-$50 today. It's believable to me that with the steady progress of technology, $20 Android smart phones will be available in a year or two anyway.
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I don't doubt that. The problem, of course, is that they'll run Android.
How is this cheap? (Score:2)
The ZTE Open is $69 - $79 unsubsidized.
Huawei has three unsubsidized phones for $79 before rebates.
http://www.metropcs.com/metro/... [metropcs.com]
What's the advantage of the FFOS phone over the cheap Android phones?
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What's the advantage of the FFOS phone over the cheap Android phones?
Isn't it obvious? It doesn't run Android!
Self thought (Score:2)
Self thought:
"Maybe it's time to upgrade my Nokia C2 for a Firefox OS phone.
I don't care a fancy phone with camera(s) and social netcrap.
I just need to call, maybe check mails, sometimes play a song and a lot of battery duration.
The C2 can last almost ~seven days, the mp3 player is a crapy one but usable.
I want to be cheap on phones... "
So, yes maybe there is a lot of people like me that only need the basics.
-
XP (rotate to see -XP- giving tongue to windows 8-hate.)
i think it has a chance (Score:2)
"Second: Yes, the developing world is growing and, yes, smartphone adoption is always rocketing up and, yes, eventually feature phones will be a thing of the past. But this won't happen tomorrow.
If they get people using low end phones accustomed to FirefoxOS then they have successfully developed a market share.
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A quick google search [lmgtfy.com] brings up a recent top-10 list which reveals several decent choices. A couple of exames are: Samsung gusto 2 [lmgtfy.com] available for Verizon and Samsung Entro [lmgtfy.com] for Virgin Mobile.
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This is not an insightful, quirky observation about modern, overengineered gadgets that try to do everything but fail to do anything well.
It's a tired and overused rant being perpetually parroted by people who don't even want what they're asking for.
If you were actually looking for such a phone, you'd have done a simple web search and found plenty of phones in the $30 range with over a month of standby time, like the Nokia 105.
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If I remember correctly the cheapest phones are sold for US $12 on the street in China, which are sold for US $ 10 in larger quanities direcly from the factory:
http://www.bunniestudios.com/b... [bunniestudios.com]
Disability discrimination much? (Score:2)
He likely is unable to leave the basement without a chair lift.
Which isn't necessarily something to be ashamed of, especially as people who graduated from college in the 1970s hit retirement age.
The goverment's PINGAS envy (Score:2)
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Oh really? How's that been working out for you so far? How many - even of that self-selected few - actually compile their mobile OS from hand-verified source, pray tell?
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Would having the source allow one to spoof one's location?
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I'd push greater commitment to keeping the essential components of the system under FOSS licenses onto the head of that list.
Except such a thing is irrelevant to all but a microscopic minority of nerds.
I totally disagree.
It's also really important to regulatory agencies like the FCC in the U.S., the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the Ministere de l'Econonie des Finances et des L'Industrie in France, the Federal Network Agency for Electricity, Gas, Telecommunications, Post and Railway in Germany, the European Radiocommunication Office in all of Europe, the Commission for Communications Regulation, and other government a
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From the "Measuring the Information Society" report report [itu.int] prepared by the United Nations International Telecommunication Union:
"Between 2010 and 2011, mobile-cellular subscriptions uptake of both fixed (wired)-broadband and mobile-registered continuous double-digit growth in developing-country markets, but an overall slowdown in comparison with previous years. The number of mobile-cellular subscriptions increased by more than 600 million, almost all of them in the developing world, to a total of around 6 b
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Your doubts are wrong.
It's 3.5 billion have a feature phone, a smaller part of the human race has a smartphone.
But more than have of the people on this planet does own a phone.
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A bill introduced by a Democrat and co-sponsored by 13 Democrats (and 0 Republicans) is clearly a Republican initiative.
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I guess, if the "Linux everywhere" you've been waiting for is little more than a launcher for strangely limited Java apps with an impossibly bad UI.
Dream bigger.