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Re:Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets by piokuc on Monday February 24, 2014 @09:03AM (#7290745)
The low price is crucial - it's about emerging markets. Think Africa, Asia, South America.
Re:Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets by netcan on Monday February 24, 2014 @09:31AM (#7290917)
I agree. I'm just speculating about the best way of doing low price. Trying to design a project involving hardware that must be produced at high volume to reduce price, software that isn't currently being widely used and keeping it all at disruptively low price is a risky, hard thing to pull off. OLPC never quite made it.

A relatively low risk strategy might be see what's out there in volume, tweak, adopt and apply downward price pressure. Those phones have the advantage of already being in production with many units worth of experience. Starting at $70 with the aim of getting to $25 may not be a long way of getting there.

I don't really know anything about the business. Just thinking out loud.

Re:Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets by sspiff on Monday February 24, 2014 @09:08AM (#7290772)
The same was true for the OLPC, so netcan's argument is still valid.
Re:Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets by vidarh on Monday February 24, 2014 @11:32AM (#7291648)
But the price will get there soon with or without Mozilla. Android phones are already readily available at <$40. Give it another year and chances are they'll hit $25 anyway.
Re:Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets by ChrisAntaki on Monday February 24, 2014 @09:18AM (#7290832)
Definitely. I just hope they bring it to flagship phones as well. I could see a lot of developers and open source advocates jumping on it. Especially if it had granular permission controls, which I believe Google had to bail on for backwards compatibility reasons [1].

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/13/google-removes-apps-ops-p...

Re:Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets by fidotron on Monday February 24, 2014 @11:10AM (#7291518)
The problem with flagship phones is the screens, which are high res enough that GPU acceleration of the user interface is mandatory for decent performance. Doing good enough GPU side rendering of web content is an unsolved problem, and if your devs are having to worry about it (as many mobile web devs already do) you've lost the point of using the web stack in the first place.
Re:Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets by ChrisAntaki on Monday February 24, 2014 @12:16PM (#7291945)
Sencha had some great results, with their FastBook project. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCn3R3-XxBU
Re:Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets by camus2 on Monday February 24, 2014 @02:31PM (#7292871)
so much great results they never open sourced that stuff... yeah ,like getting great results in HTML/JS is easy...