A lot of the misgivings most developers seem to have in this thread have to do with the physical hardware specs. Which I hate to use this term but this is a side effect of "1st world privilege". FireFoxOS/Phones were designed for emerging markets [1]. In the West dropping $500+ USD on a smartphone is not uncommon (Or to sell retail phones for this price). While in 'emerging markets' like China/India/Brazil/etc. 500 dollars can be 4-6 months worth of rent [2].
[1] FireFoxOS presentation at mobile conference circa 2013
What really "grinds my gears" is that when you want to use a particular mobile OS, you have to go out and buy a specific piece of hardware. I want to be able to choose from a range of phones, and then select the OS for them. Even if that means the OS is installed on a micro SD card, or even a variant of the SIM card.
Forgetting WP? And even Android? Can you go out, buy a Lumia, and install a working copy of Android?
You can install Android on devices that are already running some version of Android. And some fringe cases like the HTC HD2 and HP Touchpad (I had both, the Touchpad didn't work too great). But that's far from what the OP was asking for.
An OS operates hardware, hardware needs drivers, drivers need testing, this is expensive and time consuming and not very possible for all hardware, even if the parts claim pin compatibility.
Hardware manufacturers compete with each other for market. If every handset is the same compatible hardware, that just leaves build quality and price as the variables and they are orthogonal.
That means hardware people also like to add features like GPS, compass, different cameras, expansion ports, heartrate monitor, fingerprint recognition, dual-sim, etc. etc. and we're back to drivers and testing.
The PC market used to be the same way -- you had Commodore, Coleco Adam, Apple, Ti, etc. But eventually the market settled on a standard (x86 architecture), with multiple OS environments and applications available on hardware from multiple vendors. Of course you still have outliers. But I'd think that at some point a new player would come into the market, make a bunch of handset models with off the shelf features, and ship the environments separately. Just like IBM did with the PC, and the clones followed.
Maybe but there is much blood on the floor of those markets. They rallied around one OS, if you recall, and that OS manufacturer was successfully prosecuted for exploiting their de-facto monopoly. Consumers were definitely harmed.
Dell, the leading hardware supplier lead the race to the bottom and now flounders. PC commodity markets are cut-throat and it is Intel that makes the real $.
As someone who was born in one of those emerging markets, I have my doubts that people who fall in the economic category you mentioned would spend $170 on a phone. There are way cheaper options available, for as less as $40 which play music and FM -- perhaps the two requirements that people care about it. I don't think having apps is on the top of the list, but then, this is my (anecdotal) opinion.
And that's why you can configure it to use less RAM, to emulate lower-end hardware. (The emulation is imperfect, but it's certainly better than nothing.)
There are several solid consumer-facing phones in this price range. This is not a consumer-facing phone. It contains a very specific hardware profile that isn't matched by those consumer-facing phones. This is a "reference phone" containing "reference hardware". In addition, it's the phone that Mozilla is standardizing Firefox OS development on, so it will have lots of other Mozillians using it which is important to many in the Firefox OS development ecosystem.
This phone is designed to be a superset of the hardware of other FirefoxOS phones. In theory, any hardware feature on another phone will also be found on this phone. Additionally, this phone has features like the ability to artificially limit the amount of ram it has, to test other device profiles.
> how is this better than using the emulator then?
Well, the emulator is not quite as comfortable for testing, say, calls, or SMS, or gyroscope, etc.
> also, how is this any different than the last 4 times this was done?
I am not aware of 4 times. However, it is true that Preview/Early Access Developer Phones have been released in the past. This one is not a Preview. IIUC, this one is considered stable.
Notice in its feature it has reduced system RAM controllable by software so you can mock up reduced performance phones... like those that will be sold in emerging markets.
This phone isn't invented to be your daily driver. Its built as a development platform.
You wouldn't buy a AMD Opteron A1100 Development board (AMD's ARM based CPU) and bemoan the fact that for ~$200 you can buy a vastly computational superior computer. Your buying it as a development system.
But you can also synchronize on a reference system from your competitor's systems and then you can do easy comparisons.
(For example, Solaris x86 clearly favored 1-2 specific windows/mac laptops --which could be ordered on a fast track internally-- and supported the bundled devices on those laptops if the device's type was supported at all. Swapping the external reference every few years was annoying but cheap and limited the arguments to selecting among actual configurations rather than future possibilities.)
I would hope there is another reason is like getting a reliable ABI and clear licensing for the DSP side software? Otherwise, offering a better OS on a few models of android phones will be more useful now, and then again as used Android phones enter the emerging markets.
What good is a reference phone for development of Firefox OS itself and app development on that OS if you're running Android or Windows Phone? I think you've missed the point of the device!
I think the idea was to make it possible to install Firefox OS on a popular and affordable Android handset. Both Firefox OS and apps for Fx OS could be developed on it.
guys, this is not aimed at the general public. These are unlocked phones for developers. They have features to make it easier to simulate different memory constraints and run different versions of Firefox OS.
This is not a plan or a move or an intention of Mozilla to get into hardware making. This is just a program to empower developers to have the tools to better develop and test their apps.
I disagree a little bit -- why not for the general public? reference implementation phones aren't necessarily just-for-developers -- i.e. nexus line...
There is nothing stopping the general public from buying it. It is a great device.
But if you as a company plan to offer something for the general public this means some implications such as:
* providing a end user/customer general support system that is really different than supporting developers.
* polishing versions to the point of not being dangerous or buggy. This device supports nightly updates and anyone doing nightly updates of a mobile OS knows this is a move that comes with a lot of emotion and surprise ;-)
* creating a logistic solution to keep your supply line going and establishing channels for sales point and management
The list goes on and on. Of course Mozilla has some of this in place for its current run of end user targeted devices but it is all done in partnership with hardware makes such as LG, Alcatel and ZTE who already have end user support and logistics sorted out. This device is being built by an ODM.... its a different ball game.
The difference between selling to developers and selling to end users is not about the hardware itself. Its about scale, expectations and guarantees. They are really different and require a huge amount of money which Mozilla could use elsewhere.
Its like Raspberry Pis. They are really popular and now we see lots of non-developers buying and playing with it and being happy but there is a difference in the services and guarantees you have when you go with a Raspberry Pi or when you go with a DELL/Lenovo/HP.
extra costs incurred to the consumer for features that they're unwilling to pay for normally. (software ram limiting, dual sim, OS revisioning/partitioning, etc)
There seems to be a fair amount of comments comparing the specs of this phone to other phones etc.
To clarify, this is a reference device. Meaning that having all of the functionality, like a front facing and rear facing camera, is the primary goal. They cannot make comprises by removing features of the phone, like many lower end phones do, because the point of the phone is to test how these things work in your application. A faster phone or higher screen resolution is much less important for this device than including all of the hardware functionality a developer would be targeting with their application.
The purchasing flow is confusing as shit. I paid with PayPal and entered all my info, now I'm going through again and adding the same info again, and it's asking me for payment info? Arggggggh.
And the only reason I went with Paypal was so I wouldn't have to create an account with whatever the hell "EverBuying.com" is. Argghghghgh.
Edit: I gave up. So probably, I will be charged for this phone because I completed the PayPal payment but didn't complete the crazy-ass purchasing flow. I'm kind of blown away by how shitty this is.
loL. try to buy one of the commercially "available" phones then. first they are not sold thru the operator normal channels. they have a firefox phone "hotsite"... which is common in 3rd world countries.
but usually that hot site wont even work on mobile browsers for some reason. when it works, you get a message that they are out of stock.
saying people from any country buy those phones is a lie. i know because i tried. both mexico and brazil.
in mx i did get one after 30days trying, and via channels no regular consumer would go thru. and all 3 employees in the store were very curious as to why i was buying that phone, which nobody wanted, that they didn't even remember they had one in stock... and if you ever worked in retail, you would know that it has to be really odd for a salespeople to question a sale....
This phone has the precise set of hardware specs that Mozilla is developing Firefox OS against this year. It's more phone than some need (not everyone needs dual SIM, but it's in there) and less than others need but that's what you get with a reference device.
Yes, that's correct. The goal is to allow developers to see how their app works on a memory-constrained device during testing, while also using the full 1GB during regular use.
What is a good cross platform development framework and stack that works well on Flame, Android, and iOS?
Does this list work ok?
- PhoneGap/Cordova for native access
- jQuery Mobile for UI widget
- Bootstrap3 for responsive layout
- jQuery for DOM access
- Knockout for dynamic update
- Toastr for non-blocking alerts
- Amplify for data/storage/messaging
- Underscore for general
Is html template system needed? Given that jQuery Mobile widgets are already used to build the UI.
jQuery Mobile is mostly for low spec phones or very broad compatibility. If the target can be narrowed to decently speced Webkit engines and firefox, there is no need for an extra abstraction layer.
Also PhoneGap should allow the data storage, so amplify might nit be needed , except for cache management perhaps ?
I don't know much about the intel framework, they seem to be really all over the place. Sench seems tried and true, I don't have enough experience with it to say much, except that it's a lot more flexible than building the UI in PhoneGap/Cordova in terms of widgets and controls.
unlocked... but you still need binary blobs for anything to even work.
why do they litter the earth with that garbage? a low tier phone with no requirement for binary blob drivers would make more impact than that mid tier phone. since that is exactly the same phone i can get if i buy a 2~4 yr old android phone on craigslist. 100% identical outcome.
for example, google nexus devices. They are "open" but the drivers for audio, radio, video, digitizer, etc are not. The chip providers give source to Google but only allow compiled distribution.
So Google makes two versions of Android before ignoring the device. If you want to continue using device with a third version, you either hope that loading same binary drivers work or you reverse engineer them.
As you can imagine, nobody is able to do that for every version, so even though the nexus is open, you will ever only have two versions on Android on each.
Same happens with Firefox phone i had, and will probably happen here because it's a midtier phone. If it was a low tier there were changes they could find some components the manufacturers didn't care about sharing source for drivers.
The line is generally the baseband, which isn't really all that arbitrary, but until someone comes out with an open chip and the resources to get it carrier certified, we're going to have to choose between closed devices or no devices. I'm sticking with closed devices for now.
It is not really open at the moment. They are making heavy assumptions about developers willing to use HTML5/JS. It would be nice to see JVM/Mono APIs documentation.
i use the emulator mostly. when i have to test multitouch or perf, i use an old-top-of-the-line-android that cost me $50ish on craigslist. why? because all the official firefox phones are useless. crappy touch screen. etc.
yeah, they say we should use the device people are using, but the point is, nobody uses them if not for firefox devs! also no hardware drivers when you want to flash some other kernel. just like with a android phone repurposed. so, why???
and if anyone thinks real people buy those, i challenge you. take a plane to mexico where the alcatel one is even advertised on billboards... and buy one. i tried. if you manage to find one at any store, i will reimburse your trip. they dont even sell it! nobody buys it.
in the end, those phones only secure a tiny margin for a manufacturer that would otherwise fail on the android ecosystem. a small royalty fee/donation for mozilla. and lots and lots of wasted time for the dev comunity having to document how to work around the annoyances and binary blob crap of yet another cheap phone.
not to mention the environmental impact of producing yet more phones that will not be used for a few years and then be disposed.
right... We are doing the Flame to address these issues: better hardware, better update story so they are durable for developers. These are very decent devices, fast enough, front and back camera that will let you do video calls with webrtc, etc.
Oh, and you're flat wrong about the "no one buys them" and that could cost you a lot ;)
ah, you mean app devs. so it is even worse, i dont think app devs should buy the phone just for development. that is what the emulator is for. dont be like apple.
my complain is for gaia devs, etc. i dont think this phone will allow kernel hacking any easier than repurposing an android phone. or the awful current firefox phones, that still cant be easily bought...
it is 100% the same outcome as the current phones when they launched. why insist on a mistake? either go low tier with fully open specs and drivers, or go top tier to get US adoption, which then leads to mid tier adoption. starting wit mid tier, failing, and insisting on it a 4th time... this is just wrong any way you see it. that is way i assume it is a scam. someone is profiting from that. there is no other rational explanation.
so you must be a magician because if you go to e site (which does not work on firefox mobile), it says it is not selling and ask you to go to a waiting list.
when i was there, i went to all movistar stores i could find (one per city block) and none had it. i ended up finding one in that part of mexico city, forgot the name, near the chinatown-street that has lots of electronic stores... anyway, there was a movistar store there, inside a parking lot, that had ONE open box alcatel one...
I went to a Movistar located in a nearby mall ('Galerias Mty' in Monterrey) during my lunch break. They had the Alcatel on display, along all the other cell phones.
Took me 30min to buy, mostly because of the activation.
when you develop for the countries those phones aim to be sold, you probably shouldnt even care about wasting time on the welcome screen.
in all those coutries, when you buy a phone, even a no contract one, the sales person will take the phone out of the box, fly trhu the welcome screen, activate the phone with the SIM or a test SIM card with a sms to some random number. go back to the home screen, and hand the client the phone.
Since I'm totally blind and will be setting up the phone on my own if I buy one the welcome screen matters. I'm able to set up a Nexus 4 and an iPhone with out any sited help, being able to do the same with the Firefox OS reference device is going to make me more likely to spend $170 on a device that I may never pick up again after a week.
Does anyone know why this "ships free to anywhere in the world except for Japan"? The Japanese landing page seems to only state that it'll be available soon, though I might've missed something on there as my Japanese isn't that strong yet.
When reading Japanese above your level, always pay attention to the words written in roman letters. They are a dead give away.
They are awaiting certification from JATE and TELEC.
My comment wasn't meant as "pay more attention", but as a genuine tip.
From the text that linked to the Japanese article, there were mentions about certificate, and then a quick googling of the roman words would actually be enough for almost anybody to get the gist of the text.
Probably due to rules and regulations on what mobile terminals are allowed to be sold in the country, the site mentions some certifications, but I have no idea what JATE or TELEC's certifications are.
Does anyone know what ARM core is in the Snapdragon MSM8210? Is it the Cortex-A5 or the Cortex-A7? A7 would be interesting because it supports virtualization (although memory is a little tight for that).
Dual-sim is awesome. Is there a way to have 1 SIM be soley used for data? The reason is that here you can buy a SIM package that's only data for a lot cheaper than a voice/data combined SIM. It would be awesome for me to buy pre-paid voice for when I call people (very seldom) and use the data SIM for anything data (which I use 99% of the time). Would save me a lot of money on cellphone fees.
I'm not privy to the details, but to the best of my recollection, Mozilla's contract with T2Mobile is explicitly designed to avoid the problem of stagnant updates. Namely, they're required to "provide the the Flame with updates to each new major version of Firefox OS and a simple mechanism for switching between different release channels" for quite some time.
This is also the device that Mozilla's own employees will be standardizing on for the next year or more, so it should have a relatively long useful life.
I cant find information on whether the price includes all taxes and customs if ordering to Europe. I really dont want to log into everbuying.com to ask that question though.
Can one order it with a VAT-EU invoice?
A thought on the specs, it's a pity it doesn't support Bluetooth LE. Getting Flame to work with beacons would put it on the forefront of mobile development.
Knowing the emerging marketa this OS is too little too late. 3 or 2 years ago maybe, but now you got android phones with better specs going for that price, and now that the big ones like motorola are jumping in its only going to get even cheaper.
Then there's the popularity factor and the consequential app availability that makes customers go for the market leader because all their friends use that one and they are afraid of possible compatibility issues.
We actually expect to be able to improve situation. A few tweak have been made to the hardware/firmware to allow us to better test power consumption. This will make software change happen to improve the overall battery life on this and probably other phones.
Asa Dotzler answered me about that on Twitter, "Battery life is pretty solid. I'm getting at least a couple of days of active use out of the Flame between charges."
But it's also a shame that Google's thoroughly undermined the open source Linux underpinnings of Android, by making less and less of it available once Android reached a decent market share. There's still a need for an open phone platform.
I somehow fear Firefox Accounts (and the whole relatively recent Mozilla cloud things) are tiny sway (not even a step, but) towards yet another vendor-centric approach to mobiles.
This is, obviously, much better than Google, but still a tiny bit worrying...
"Sign in with your Firefox Account" and its predecessor Firefox Sync were both designed with decentralization in mind. Unlike other services, you can set up your own sync server and take the Mozilla-run servers out of the equation entirely. https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncserver
I know that and I run my own sync-1.1 server instance. Now they force me to use more of their unique software (I'll have to run fxa-auth and fxa-content too, and edit some obscure variables in about:config) or I won't be able to sync new devices. The fear is, eventually, they may introduce more, and I'll have no choice but to give up and rely on their servers.
As contradicting example, my Keepass database sync just fine via a WebDAV - a well-established open standard, that has multiple uses and implementations, detached from authentication framework (one can use standard HTTP auth, or HTTPS certificate auth or any custom solution if they fancy so). And, obviously, if I wouldn't like to host my things myself, I can find WebDAV storage provider any day.
> I know that and I run my own sync-1.1 server instance. Now they force me to use more of their unique software (I'll have to run fxa-auth and fxa-content too, and edit some obscure variables in about:config) or I won't be able to sync new devices. The fear is, eventually, they may introduce more, and I'll have no choice but to give up and rely on their servers.
Desktop-side, we are trying to make things easier. If you wish to help, you'll be quite welcome.
What we really need is an open, standard hardware platform, not a browser based mobile OS that creates a closed consumer platform anyway. With browser OSs, the vendor can target the native platform, and app developers are stuck with second-string HTML+JS.
Can you substantiate this claim with numbers e.g. the number of lines of open source code in Android gradually decreasing, the percentage of lines of open source code in Android gradually decreasing, or similar?
Yes, an article with "Controlling open source by any means necessary" in the very title (subtitle "Android is open—except for all the good parts.") sounds like a very detailed, factual analysis of the situation.
I asked my question because I believed that the original poster had been misled by that very article which has had it's already overstretched claims amplified in repitition.
This is quite likely because at higher densities making effective use of the GPU becomes even more critical to get anything approaching decent performance.
The Moto E has an unlocked bootloader as well, and a 4.3-inch 960 x 540 IPS screen, for $130. The Moto G is $179 and has 720p. It seems like the only reason you'd buy one would be to develop.
The only reason you'd buy one is to have the Firefox OS reference device precisely so you can develop for or on Firefox OS. Yes. That is right.
The Moto E makes compromises we couldn't because the Flame is a reference device and needs more complete hardware specs. The Moto E doesn't come with a front facing camera or auto-focus or flash on the rear camera, or NFC.
Like any reference device, this is a compromise with the primary focus on completeness and appropriateness of the hardware platform, not top of the line specs.
This defensive it's-just-a-developer-phone angle seems to take it for granted that there are other FirefoxOS phones more suitable for "high-end" users who aren't looking for a developer device. Are there?
(For my part I think this spec looks good, except that like most current smartphones it's physically rather big. I have a Keon, and I would have loved a device in the same enclosure but with better quality components. I found the OS itself very comfortable to use, it's "just" the hardware I've found problematic.)
It's not an angle. It's the explicit purpose of the phone. We designed it, every component, to be our reference phone.
If you need something for some other purpose, if you've got some other angle, you could buy a Nexus 5 and put Firefox OS on there. That's a decent high end phone that I know several Firefox OS developers are using.
Thanks for the reply and yes, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to imply that there was some kind of marketing trick going on.
I just think the response here (treating this device as if it were a high-end consumer device) is somewhat understandable as well. For instance there was a thread here recently, "Best Firefox phone to get?" in which the top comment suggests waiting for the Flame:
Ah, thanks for the clarification. I was under the impression that the Flame was going to be more along the lines of the Nexus series. Those phones, going all the way back the Nexus One (even though it looked like a Palm Pilot glued to a trackball platform), were all intended as legitimate competitors in the the consumer space.
I don't think anyone is criticizing the specs from a developer perspective, there are just a lot of people on HN who like to try out new OSes and hardware. Good luck with the phone and the OS.
Look at the upcoming Alcatel Fire E (http://www.gsmarena.com/alcatel_fire_e-6139.php)
Beautiful IPS screen, very slim design. I saw it next to an iphone 5, browsing the same web content and it was totally on par.
Fair point, but it's hard to compare let's say the media player app from one OS to the other in terms of performance since the feature set plays a role there too. On the other hand, looking a the same website (I used a news site with non trivial content) is a level playing field.
>It seems like the only reason you'd buy one would be to develop.
And there's something wrong with that on a OS reference phone manufactured for developers in far smaller quantities than a Moto E or a Moto G? The only reason I'm buying one is to develop. I'm happy that it will even make calls; I've spent money on hackable phone/OS pairs that couldn't.
Firefox OS will be dead on arrival. No apps, no OEMs on board, no innovation, HTML platform which is highly questionable and a typical developer-oriented ecosphere instead of beung user-centric.
It's nice they are trying but it's a desperate attempt to grow Mozilla beyond a company which is known for its browser. With Google Chrome becoming the de-facto web browser, Firefox hastily attempting to mirror it yet loosing market share by the day, Mozilla its future doesn't look bright. At all.
So you want more than downvotes.
1) No apps: there are a few millions websites that you can use on this OS. The truth is that we still need better discovery, but there's a lot of content out there.
2) No OEMs. Sure... zte, tcl, LG, geeksphone, spreadtrum odms for now.
3) No innovation. What do you call innovation? We'll have webrtc based video calls in 2.0, and we've been pushing a lot of new apis in the web platform. What is windows phone innovation?
4) Developer ecosphere? Well, we have to get them onboard right? We are also doing a lot of reach out to users through community efforts and more classic marketing including some with partners.
Sure it's a bet, and a hard one given how the mobile ecosystem works. But we are doing well so far (I'm waiting for your comments on ubuntu / tizen / jolla that are competing with us).
I remember that when we started 2 years ago, people were just ignoring us ("no way they can make it"). Then they started to laugh at us ("their stuff is not good"). I'm happy to see some fighting us now (and not just ignoring us) because it means that we'll reach the 4th stage, where we win. Yay!
It's always amazing how people can be critical of anything Mozilla does, or doesn't.
Firefox OS supporters, please stop down voting me and instead post reasons why I am wrong. What other intent can I gain from this than believe that Firefox OS fans are delusional and fail to receive criticism?
If you need to down vote me so badly and cannot provide any arguments against my statement whatsoever, you only strengthen my case.
I didn't down vote you. I can see why people would though. For one, you're pretty far off topic. This post is about a specific Firefox OS developer device and you're speculating about Mozilla's motivations and achievements (or lack thereof.)
If not here, then where? I, myself, have all the hopes in the world for another open-source mobile ecosystem but all I've seen come out of "the project" is several burner phones and devs on HN complaining about the whole thing.
I haven't seen anyone cheering for joy at anything beyond the extensional concept.
[1] FireFoxOS presentation at mobile conference circa 2013
[2] numbeo.com