Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets

Firefox OS runs very smoothly, when being simulated on the computer.<p>On the $70 ZTE phone, it&#x27;s less than stellar, mainly because the phone has issues registering touches. Also, there are some software bugs, like momentum being saved when it should have decayed, after you lift your finger 5s later in certain scrollable views.<p>If the newer phones have better touch screens, and the OS consistently gets improved, especially on UI front, I could really see this succeeding and taking a sizable market share.<p>Regardless, it&#x27;ll change the game, and motivate Google &amp; Apple to step up their support for HTML as a platform. It&#x27;s already happening, with Android KitKat [1].<p>[1] <a href="http://java.dzone.com/articles/android-44-kitkat-browser-and" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;java.dzone.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;android-44-kitkat-browser-and</a>

The OLPC story kind of makes me think that announcing and planning a disruptive change when the disruption is mostly price based is a tricky strategy.<p>I wonder if Firefox might find it easier to just pick up existing low end android models and see if they can get a better experience with Firefox OS.

I think this is a very promising development (OLPC anyone?) but Android is cheerfully doing this organically:<p>&quot;Looking at nice dual-core dual-SIM 3G Android for $30-40 wholesale. Quad-core for $100-125. And increasingly hard to tell apart from premium&quot; (tweet from @BenedictEvans this morning).

There is no way a phone that can run firefox os won&#x27;t also be suitable for android and visa versa.<p>And free OS is free OS ? How does either add to the cost of the phone?<p>Am I missing something?<p>Not that more competition is not a better thing, I mean I love my firefox browser and only grudgingly use chrome.

I&#x27;d love to see a Mozilla phone work in the market and I might buy one, but I&#x27;m skeptical about the $25 price point for a phone that&#x27;s based on a web browser.<p>At the very least you need a battery that lets you actually use that browser for more than 15 minutes. That&#x27;s about $10. Now there&#x27;s $15 left for a touch display and a chipset and all the rest of it. That&#x27;s very hard to imagine.

I hope it doesn&#x27;t work out. I would hate to live in a HTML-JS only future they are trying to build. And please don&#x27;t tell me about transpilation, because it&#x27;s crap.

This is really cool, but I doubt it&#x27;ll do much to the market.<p>If the Firefox OS runs a browser brilliantly on this device, it might be a disruptor in the more developed world actually. But I find it unlikely that a low-cost smartphone with the level of power one can expect could do that (even my Nexus5 still chokes on loading some pages, chews battery running the browser, etc), so<p>&gt; &quot;You&#x27;re talking about a clumsy smartphone that&#x27;s a little bit better than a feature phone - still primarily for voice and text.&quot;<p>will probably remain true.<p>Keep in mind that the &quot;rest of the world&quot; on average still runs on 2G with spotty 3G coverage, and uses little more of smartphone (or feature phone) functionality than Whatsapp (because that&#x27;s all that can effectively function as intended on those networks).<p>The phone itself being cheaper does little to change their usage patterns: In India, before the iOS&#x2F;Android smartphone era (~2006), even middle class schoolkids or the working class in oppressed areas who didn&#x27;t have a solid roof over their head still had Sony Ericsson Walkman phones ($200 then) and Nokia N66s ($150-$300 over its lifetime). People like fancy phones in the developing world, and lowering the price will make the tiniest of dents in that space.

I think more than a cheap phone they need a premium phone. A good looking, high end camera packing phone that shows the best of the platform. I agree with many who state here that Android is already doing well at the low end. The sub 25 USD buyer finds such phones too complicated.

freedom [1] is a more important feature of this phone to me. I think other brands will get to a low price but they&#x27;ll never get the freedom.<p>[1] Not part of some mega company&#x27;s mega cloud

Spain starting to be considered as an emerging country?

Is this where Android &#x2F; iOS devs start wishing they&#x27;d gone with HTML5 &#x2F; JS instead?