“Mozilla and Foxconn have officially announced a partnership and confirmed that the two firms are developing at least 5 new devices, including a tablet computer. At a press conference today at Computex 2013 in Taipei, Li Gong, CEO of Mozilla Taiwan, and Young Liu, General Manager of Foxconn innovation Digital System Business Group, unveiled a new tablet prototype model designed for an unnamed OEM.”
That this helps to break up the logjam (including the Blackberry and WP saplings) in the mobile OS stream. The trick to be pulled off is to deliver a feasible alternative *despite* the kind of pressure that such an expectation is going to produce. Having just spent a weekend flashing a tablet just to get my hands on an update, I wish all the partners in this venture God speed if they can produce a tightly integrated, fleet-of-foot OS-based product which will benefit from a rapid update schedule, and which out-of-the-box won’t be party to the kinds of insidious big data amassing that many others seem to indulge in as an ongoing by-product of an apparently one-time purchase. I would also fervently pray that they won’t try to emulate the current app business model but will seek to subvert it, so that a sluice gate can be closed on this whole ‘software as subscription model’ channel (or should I say, gutter).
Yeah, I know I am talking out of my hobbyist ass but you all know what I mean.
Orf.
I don’t expect that much from my tablet.
Some browsing, email, some youtube and GPS now and again. The most important entertainment app for me is an ereader. I think it is paramount for Firefox to either/and get the Kobo or Kindle app on it and you will have a lot of satisfied users.
Edited 2013-06-03 14:23 UTC
I’m not saying they copied people’s idea, but the tablet sounds pretty much like a tablet version chromebook… did I miss something significant here?
Chromebook runs a fully fledged operating system with a window manager and native apps on top which also happens to run web apps. Firefox OS is made in HTML5/JavaScript from the ground up, everything in there is a web page, there isn’t a single line of native code besides the (hidden) browser. Even the window manager is written in JavaScript:
https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/blob/master/apps/system/js/windo…
And the Chromebook also spies on you all the time also.
And this is supposed to be light, used with inexpensive (hence “slow”) handsets?