4 ms·

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

by piokuc 13y ago

sspiff 13y ago
The same was true for the OLPC, so netcan's argument is still valid.
ChrisAntaki 13y ago
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-permission-manager/ http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/13/google-removes-apps-ops-p...
- fidotron 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      so much great results they never open sourced that stuff... yeah ,like getting great results in HTML/JS is easy...
netcan 13y ago
I agree. I'm just speculating about the best way of doing low price. Trying to design a project involving hardware that must be produced at high volume to reduce price, software that isn't currently being widely used and keeping it all at disruptively low price is a risky, hard thing to pull off. OLPC never quite made it. A relatively low risk strategy might be see what's out there in volume, tweak, adopt and apply downward price pressure. Those phones have the advantage of already being in production with many units worth of experience. Starting at $70 with the aim of getting to $25 may not be a long way of getting there. I don't really know anything about the business. Just thinking out loud.
vidarh 13y ago
But the price will get there soon with or without Mozilla. Android phones are already readily available at <$40. Give it another year and chances are they'll hit $25 anyway.

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

by piokuc 13y ago

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

sspiff 13y ago

The same was true for the OLPC, so netcan's argument is still valid.

ChrisAntaki 13y ago

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-permission-manager/ http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/13/google-removes-apps-ops-p...

fidotron 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    so much great results they never open sourced that stuff... yeah ,like getting great results in HTML/JS is easy...

netcan 13y ago

I agree. I'm just speculating about the best way of doing low price. Trying to design a project involving hardware that must be produced at high volume to reduce price, software that isn't currently being widely used and keeping it all at disruptively low price is a risky, hard thing to pull off. OLPC never quite made it. A relatively low risk strategy might be see what's out there in volume, tweak, adopt and apply downward price pressure. Those phones have the advantage of already being in production with many units worth of experience. Starting at $70 with the aim of getting to $25 may not be a long way of getting there. I don't really know anything about the business. Just thinking out loud.

vidarh 13y ago

But the price will get there soon with or without Mozilla. Android phones are already readily available at <$40. Give it another year and chances are they'll hit $25 anyway.