That said, I believe that even a slow Firefox OS phone that at least handles touch interaction elegantly and responsively has a good chance of succeeding in displacing feature phones in developing markets.
From there, a friend mentioned that a lot of the UI in the latest devices with the untainted google experience had gone that direction in 4.x, I got a first gen Nexus 7... loved it, from there was going to get a Nexus, but held out for the Nexus 4. The first "smart" phone I actually liked... didn't wish it were a little more responsive, or a little faster.
The down side, even now, technical difficulties persist. For some reason the bluetooth doesn't sync to my car unless I turn it off, then back on... my last phone (ZTE) was worse than the samsung I had before that, or my G1.
Most people wouldn't stick with this kind of experience if there's something perceived to be better available. If the iPhone were available on a carrier other than AT&T early on, I would have switched over from my G1.
Something tells me that poor experiences on cheap Firefox OS devices will only lead to more Android and iOS adoption in those markets.
* async pan and zoom
* `will-change` support (avoid layers flattening) progressive tiles rendering
* better texture allocation mechanism
* CSS snapping
* position: sticky
* and many gaia code improvements (reflow and lags hunting)
On the $70 ZTE phone, it'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.
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.
Regardless, it'll change the game, and motivate Google & Apple to step up their support for HTML as a platform. It's already happening, with Android KitKat [1].
[1] http://java.dzone.com/articles/android-44-kitkat-browser-and