Robert Nyman, a Mozilla technical evangelist and editor of the Mozilla Hacks website, provides a perspective on the history and evolution of Firefox OS in this LinuxGizmos guest column. Nyman writes on the occasion of the first Firefox OS smartphone, the $90 ZTE Open, becoming available for sale in Madrid, Spain.
SoCs are becoming so inexpensive that there’s even full Android phones that can run jellybean with most everything out there for cheap.
You can get a phone as capable as the Galaxy S2 (now two years old) with a Rockchip SoC, (dual core with Mali 400 GPU), and maybe not the best screen but good enough for peanuts.
Why do you think Android is completely dominating emergent markets? Even Samsung has cheap phones for those markets running Android.
Wait a minute… Is this a trick question? The answer is because Android is the only option. It’s free (price) and open.
Mobile operating systems that will be competing directly with Android in emergent markets are Firefox OS, Ubuntu Touch, and Sailfish OS.
Symbian was also big in emerging markets, and Bada had some success before Samsung stopped releasing new Wave series phones.
Bada phones were mostly selling on price. I imagine the same will happen for FirefoxOS. When mindshare and ecosystem for HTML5 apps become large enough, FirefoxOS (and Tizen) may even command prices similar to low-end Android phones.
It’s really not going to work, people is not as stupid as you think. There are other alternatives already in emergent countries such as blackberries and Windows Phone (lumia 620), yet they are doing abysmally bad.
The reason is simple, you can still get the high end phones in emergent countries. People knows the Galaxy S line, or the expensive Xperia models.
They are more expensive than in the states or europe but, even if only few can afford them, most people still know them and want them.
Yet, they settle with the “cheap” versions of those phones, like the Xperia S, the S3 Mini, which are similar but offer less performance, resolution, etc.
This is why Samsung and Android also dominate even in the emergent countries, and why Ubuntu or Firefox OS have no chance.
People will always prefer the cheap versions of the expensive phones, not just cheap phones.
Edited 2013-07-09 20:24 UTC
Fully agree, based on my telecommunications background.
What? What’s not going to work? I didn’t say anything about any mobile operating system having success or failing. I just wanted you to clarify your statement. Thank you for doing so.
Did you want to hear my opinion? My opinion is that none of the three new operating systems that I mentioned will gain much market share because they don’t offer something special that the average phone user wants.
But I don’t care, as long as I can buy a Jolla phone.
You just sold bear’s skin before killing it. The same thing was said about Android during its early start. The idea to use pure HTML5/CSS/Javascript is intriguing.
The whole “your phone is the web browser” idea of Firefox OS is also really stupid if targeting emergent markets.
Being in South America, and even if by some miracle people found those phones more interesting than Android phones, 3G and mobile internet here is absolutely terrible.
Pretty uninformed are we? Why would you think Firefox OS needs an 3G connection where other OS’s wouldn’t?
Here is a tip: _it doesn’t need an internet connection_
Because it is a browser OS? duh!
Please please let this be sarcasm
Edited 2013-07-10 11:23 UTC
You misunderstand.
Supposedly FirefoxOS doesn’t need dual core and Lava is planning to make a phone at less than US $50:
http://tech2.in.com/news/smartphones/lava-working-on-a-smartphone-r…