Firefox OS Developer Preview Devices Announced

Damnit Mozilla, I want a web based mobile platform to succeed so badly and you're the company for it, but you keep killing your own fire with these repeated false starts. A 600 word blog post to announce the availability of a <i>holding page</i>? My credit card is burning a hole in my pocket! The approximate specs for the lowest end device were available on the B2G wiki for months.<p>Looking forward to holding this in my hand. For a few cents per unit, they might have made it even more compelling by adding dual SIM slots, certainly Chinese vendors seem to be able to manage this on &#60;$100 Android handsets.

No buy link, what a wasted announcement. They unveiled... a holding page.

I'm stoked that they partnered with geeksphone. I adored my geeksphone one. The pricing is what will be important here, as the low end android handsets are still lacking in the low-end market, in terms of performance anyway[0].<p>If they beat Androids performance, and development is easy, then it has a shot in my opinion. I mean, your basic apps are there already (such as <a href="http://x.Facebook.com" rel="nofollow">http://x.Facebook.com</a>), and if it's simple enough to port my mobile web apps over, I know I'll take the plunge.<p>[0] Source: I sell phones in Australia

I loaded up Firefox OS on a Nexus S a few months back and the performance was really really poor compared to Android 4 running on the same hardware.<p>Their low end device looks similarly specced, so I'm a bit worried about how it will come off. Haven't gone through loading up the latest builds so perhaps performance has improved a lot.<p>Before Android 4.* (especially 4.1 and Butter) I think there was room for another competitor in the market, but I'm having a hard time believing FirefoxOS is going to be able to make significant inroads.<p>Android has finally grown up and contract-free low end phones are now available for $60. I would expect the 2013 ultra low end handsets will be 4.* which is really going to be a game changer.

Is that an officially endorsed dev platform by Mozilla? It sure seems to imply it, but I can't see anything on the website that directly says so. I have no doubt it'll run the builds, but when you're buying a pre-launch dev platform it makes a big difference if it's the one the core devs are going to be using and be an official platform target. I'm not suggesting it isn't, but its not on the site.

I'm going to buy a device just to support their initiative. For some reason I think it might become a raspberry pi of phone segment. Everything is open source so it's possible to tweak it as much as you heart desires.<p>Considering specs of the lower gen phone it should cost about $100.

I know Javier, the 20-yo entrepreneur behind Geeksphone - he's a brilliant mind, simply outstanding. I also know the CEO, really nice guy. They knew it was gonna be a risky move, but I think they just nailed it. Congratulations Javier and the Geeksphone staff!

Aww come on! I just ordered an N9 so I could run Firefox OS (and several other phone OSes coming out this year) and now this comes out?

The masses: "Should I buy an iPhone or a Galaxy?"

It's too late in this generation for another serious competitor to emerge in mobile. Microsoft might be able to muscle its way into double digits but everybody else is just too late to the game now.<p>Better to focus on what comes after phones &#38; tablets, whatever that is.

One thing that keeps bothering me are circular app icons. I don't know, it's different but I just disagree. That facebook logo in a ... bubble :)

Looks like it is an ARM v7 CPU in the cheaper device (ARM v6 S1 SOC CPU cores don't go up to 1GHz), which is good to see as the baseline.

There's a phrase that has been going around the usual meme-heavy sites for some time that I think would be useful here: "Shut up and take my money." Strutting around while making announcements of something people already know about, only to have those announcements lead to a holding page rather than a buying opportunity, only irritates people. Give them something they can buy, and they will.

Couldn't they have done this design without ripping off the water droplet background from Apple? <a href="http://www.geeksphone.com/#slider-peak" rel="nofollow">http://www.geeksphone.com/#slider-peak</a>

irony: this site looks bad on firefox for android