11 ms·

$25 Smartphones on Firefox OS to Rock MWC

100 points by kryptiskt 13y ago

yeukhon 13y ago
> "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?
- sirkneeland 13y ago
  One possible alternative is to offload at least some of the photo editing computation to the cloud. That of course just leads to a different tradeoff of latency and (likely metered) data... so it may or may not make sense
- idlewan 13y ago
  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").
Zigurd 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    Does this use the same code in standard firefox , or a different code base?
    - rhelmer 13y ago
      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
    - Yoric 13y ago
      Gecko is shared. Everything else is different.
- mariusmg 13y ago
  Android runs like crap on that hardware. Windows Phone 7 is the only OS which runs fine on that.
  - dagw 13y ago
    Android 4 perhaps, but I have an old Android 2.3 phone kicking around with that spec and runs just fine.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
leeoniya 13y ago
> "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 13y ago
  It just doesnt make sense, Firefox OS doesnt do more 'in the cloud' than you would expect.
  - thirsteh 13y ago
    Don't question the power of the cloud!
    - leeoniya 13y ago
      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 13y ago
        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.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Thiz 13y ago
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 13y ago
  As long as it's not slower than a J2ME feature phone.
  - grayrest 13y ago
    Shouldn't be too bad. The original B2G dev phones were the Nexus S, which doesn't look that far off in terms of processor specs. It's been 6+ months since I've done a build for the Nexus S but the perf was generally acceptable but dropped the occasional animation frames like the earlier gen android phones.
  - camus2 13y ago
    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.
asb 13y ago
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?
- bvttf 13y ago
  The new developer phones have an option to pretend you have 256, so they're probably supporting that. The linked bug is Firefox on Android, where it has to share with everything else Android's doing.
- ianbicking 13y ago
  Underlying Firefox OS is B2G/boot-to-Gecko. That doesn't include any of the Android app stuff that's in Fennec.
  - asb 13y ago
    Ok, I misunderstood the architecture. I thought Fennec was a retargetable 'mobile Firefox' core as opposed to Firefox for Android.
- rhelmer 13y ago
  Fennec is not the core of FirefoxOS, no. Gecko is the core of both, but Fennec provides an Android UI. Fennec's requirements are more tied to what the underlying Android version supports. FirefoxOS is in fact working on requiring even less memory - there is a project underway to support devices with 128MiB: https://wiki.mozilla.org/FirefoxOS/Tarako https://wiki.mozilla.org/FirefoxOS/Tarako
currywurst 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
jokoon 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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-mtns-50-steppa-gambles-already-paying-off/ http://memeburn.com/2014/02/huaweis-sub-70-smartphone-shows-... $25 is the next wave.
  - tekni5 13y ago
    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.
4ad 13y ago
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.
- muro 13y ago
  I have the Keon (https://marketplace.firefox.com/developers/dev_phone https://marketplace.firefox.com/developers/dev_phone) here. It's not good - I could say it's directly manufactured electronic waste, but that would be rude, so I won't. The first iPhone and android phones were better - more than 5 years ago.
  - idlewan 13y ago
    I have the Keon. It is perfectly fine for my usage (mostly texts and light browsing), and fast enough in most default apps. I am also quite impressed by how fluid applications from the market are, Cut the rope included (I expected it to have very crappy framerate, but no). My HTC Hero (which is totally obsolete by now - you can't upgrade Android phones once the manufacturer released other phones and doesn't care anymore) is only fluid on the home screen. Everything else (even the Play store!) is slow and laggy. I can't play most games and can't install most apps on the Hero (armv6 means no Firefox, no Telegram, no 'anything using jni'). So I strongly disagree: the Keon is good enough, and the first Android phones were NOT better (you seem spoiled, high-end user! Just because it's not as fast as $400 phones does not mean it can't be interesting).
    - camus2 13y ago
      sorry,you cant honestly recommand that phone.It's pure crap and a total waste of money.I suggest people looking for cheap feature phones to buy some old midlet based nokia/lg/sony.They do what a phone is supposed to do and they do it right,unlike Firefox os based phones which are pure crap. HTML5 based os need a lot of processing power,webos already proved it in the past. That's why firefox os will fail,it's not designed for lowend devices.
      - 13y ago
daleharvey 13y ago
Here is some slides from people working on getting Firefox OS on 128MB devices - http://www.codemud.net/~thinker/share/tarako-memshrink-embed.svg http://www.codemud.net/~thinker/share/tarako-memshrink-embed...
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
  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.
  - dublinben 13y ago
    My only criticism is that there's no easy way to step back a page.
  - chrismorgan 13y ago
    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.html http://chrismorgan.info/blog/rust-docs-vision-presentation.h...
Jare 13y ago
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
unsigner 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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?
matznerd 13y ago
But will it run WhatsApp?! ;)
- idlewan 13y ago
  Try Loqui IM on the marketplace.
nikhilkmenon 13y ago
Future possibilities - FirefoxOSCast like ChromeCast (under $35), Firefoxbook like ChromeBook (under $100).
ksec 13y ago
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?

100 points by kryptiskt 13y ago

> "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?

sirkneeland 13y ago
One possible alternative is to offload at least some of the photo editing computation to the cloud. That of course just leads to a different tradeoff of latency and (likely metered) data... so it may or may not make sense
idlewan 13y ago
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").

Zigurd 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  Does this use the same code in standard firefox , or a different code base?
  - rhelmer 13y ago
    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
  - Yoric 13y ago
    Gecko is shared. Everything else is different.
mariusmg 13y ago
Android runs like crap on that hardware. Windows Phone 7 is the only OS which runs fine on that.
- dagw 13y ago
  Android 4 perhaps, but I have an old Android 2.3 phone kicking around with that spec and runs just fine.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]

leeoniya 13y ago

> "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 13y ago
It just doesnt make sense, Firefox OS doesnt do more 'in the cloud' than you would expect.
- thirsteh 13y ago
  Don't question the power of the cloud!
  - leeoniya 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      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.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

Thiz 13y ago

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 13y ago
As long as it's not slower than a J2ME feature phone.
- grayrest 13y ago
  Shouldn't be too bad. The original B2G dev phones were the Nexus S, which doesn't look that far off in terms of processor specs. It's been 6+ months since I've done a build for the Nexus S but the perf was generally acceptable but dropped the occasional animation frames like the earlier gen android phones.
- camus2 13y ago
  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.

asb 13y ago

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?

bvttf 13y ago
The new developer phones have an option to pretend you have 256, so they're probably supporting that. The linked bug is Firefox on Android, where it has to share with everything else Android's doing.
ianbicking 13y ago
Underlying Firefox OS is B2G/boot-to-Gecko. That doesn't include any of the Android app stuff that's in Fennec.
- asb 13y ago
  Ok, I misunderstood the architecture. I thought Fennec was a retargetable 'mobile Firefox' core as opposed to Firefox for Android.
rhelmer 13y ago
Fennec is not the core of FirefoxOS, no. Gecko is the core of both, but Fennec provides an Android UI. Fennec's requirements are more tied to what the underlying Android version supports. FirefoxOS is in fact working on requiring even less memory - there is a project underway to support devices with 128MiB: https://wiki.mozilla.org/FirefoxOS/Tarako https://wiki.mozilla.org/FirefoxOS/Tarako

currywurst 13y ago

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 13y ago
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...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

jokoon 13y ago

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 13y ago
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-mtns-50-steppa-gambles-already-paying-off/ http://memeburn.com/2014/02/huaweis-sub-70-smartphone-shows-... $25 is the next wave.
- tekni5 13y ago
  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.

4ad 13y ago

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.

muro 13y ago
I have the Keon (https://marketplace.firefox.com/developers/dev_phone https://marketplace.firefox.com/developers/dev_phone) here. It's not good - I could say it's directly manufactured electronic waste, but that would be rude, so I won't. The first iPhone and android phones were better - more than 5 years ago.
- idlewan 13y ago
  I have the Keon. It is perfectly fine for my usage (mostly texts and light browsing), and fast enough in most default apps. I am also quite impressed by how fluid applications from the market are, Cut the rope included (I expected it to have very crappy framerate, but no). My HTC Hero (which is totally obsolete by now - you can't upgrade Android phones once the manufacturer released other phones and doesn't care anymore) is only fluid on the home screen. Everything else (even the Play store!) is slow and laggy. I can't play most games and can't install most apps on the Hero (armv6 means no Firefox, no Telegram, no 'anything using jni'). So I strongly disagree: the Keon is good enough, and the first Android phones were NOT better (you seem spoiled, high-end user! Just because it's not as fast as $400 phones does not mean it can't be interesting).
  - camus2 13y ago
    sorry,you cant honestly recommand that phone.It's pure crap and a total waste of money.I suggest people looking for cheap feature phones to buy some old midlet based nokia/lg/sony.They do what a phone is supposed to do and they do it right,unlike Firefox os based phones which are pure crap. HTML5 based os need a lot of processing power,webos already proved it in the past. That's why firefox os will fail,it's not designed for lowend devices.
    - 13y ago

daleharvey 13y ago

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

TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
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.
- dublinben 13y ago
  My only criticism is that there's no easy way to step back a page.
- chrismorgan 13y ago
  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.html http://chrismorgan.info/blog/rust-docs-vision-presentation.h...

Jare 13y ago

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

unsigner 13y ago

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 13y ago
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?

matznerd 13y ago

But will it run WhatsApp?! ;)

idlewan 13y ago
Try Loqui IM on the marketplace.

nikhilkmenon 13y ago

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

ksec 13y ago

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?