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Re:Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get? by gcb0 on Sunday April 27, 2014 @06:24PM (#7657219)
Most people here are giving suggestions without owning any Firefox phone.

I actually bought one when i was in Mexico. I tried to see them but even finding one to buy is difficult. See in mx and most other countries without heavy regulation, telefonica from Spain owns the market. And usually they have a shell company as competitor to avoid a mother bell like monopoly. In Mexico the shell company is movistar, the one that sells Firefox phones. Now, they spent millions advertising it. But any store i entered i was told they,never had it for sale. after 20 days and more than 50 stores i finally found one in the shady downtown area were you can buy most imported electronics without tax... The store was inside a parking lot, had 4 full time employees and had a total of 5 phones that they could sell (if that's not the point of sale of a shell company i don't know what it is) but one of the phone was a touch fire. So i bought it.

it was ffos almost stock, albeit and older version, there is zero new features from 1.1 to the bleeding edge 1.4... One nicety was offline gps app right out of the box. That beats any ios or Android phone.

Now for using the phone.. It's impossible because it is slow and crash all the time.

The only reason anyone would use one as their main phone is if said someone already compiled the emulator and wrote all the applications he thinks he will write when getting the phone. Until you do that, avoid getting the phone. I use mine just to see how slow a site with too much js would be

Re:Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get? by soapdog on Monday April 28, 2014 @09:31AM (#7659761)
Hey, there are LOTS of new features from 1.1 to 1.4. Heck there are new APIs available, advancements to all the rendering stuff...

I am a mobile app developer. I have all platforms in here and I use Firefox OS as my daily driver. I get angry sometimes and things do not work as expected or when I see a bug but dogfooding is a great way to recognize points where you need to improve and then work on it.

I haven't seen a FXOS phone crashing all the time. They can be perceived as slow if you're used to high end devices but their performance still great when compared to entry level device.

Also Movistar is not a shell company. Its present in many countries in South America. Telefonica owns many telcos such as Movistar and VIVO.

I have some Alcatel phones in here, most of them running 1.1 and one running a nightly build of 1.3. They are working as expected and they used to cost USD 75 here for a while at the same time the cheapest Android was USD 150.

But as I said above, there are still features needed and believe me 1.3 is much better than 1.1 regarding performance. I hope with the new devices and new OS we can make a better impression on you. As for 1.1 on that device, lots of people migrated from their feature phones and are pretty happy with the purchase.

Re:Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get? by gcb0 on Monday April 28, 2014 @02:15PM (#7661839)
yes, the rendering stuff is nice. i agree wholeheartedly... i'm using 1.4 on that phone since i got it, btw.

but for daily use, there is absolutely nothing new that deserves mention.

Re:Ask HN: Best Firefox phone to get? by gcb0 on Sunday April 27, 2014 @06:25PM (#7657224)
Oh, and it requires hacks and binary blobs and impossible-to-compile-your-own kernel images... So there's that too.