Today 10 years ago I went to Poland to buy a Phone with pre installed #Firefox OS on. The Phone was a Alcatel One, so very shitty. Two years later I installed Firefox OS on my Nexus 5 instead.
It was a very good concept, but sadly rolled out on too shitty hardware so it never caught on.
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i really hope these alt-mobile OS’s take off, i know theres things like pinephone and kde mobile but they’re still a little bit rough around the edges last i checked… at the same time tho maybe i should do some more digging around. i imagine someone’s made a daily-driveable alternate OS for phones at this point
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FFOS was an html mess. The GUI didn’t have much to offer. You couldn’t organize your apps since they were only accessible through the cluttered app drawer.
The HTML was not the problem, the never finished OS was one yes.
I still liked it because of how easy it was to develop apps for it like I did with my https://jeena.net/feedmonkey
Indeed, there were advantages when It came to app development. There was for example, the Unity web exporter. Embedding web apps for the OS worked out of the box. On the flip side, there was an impact on performance. Like there was no multithreading possible. At least not for the Unity Web export.
We had two of these that ended up sitting in my desk at work back around that time. They were sent to us free with hopes we would port our (shitty) android/iOS apps to it. One was a bit newer, but they both just felt shitty compared to the equivalent Nexus or iPhone of the time, so I never bothered trying to use it as a daily driver. I wasn’t even on the app dev team, no one else wanted them or cared at all. Was fun as a technical curiosity though.
Jealous. That always looked cool. Sad it never caught on.
Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Seemed like a silly endeavor by Mozilla.
Remember when android phones fitted in hands?
I don’t miss it.
as someone with small hands: I very much do
As someone who doesn’t wear jnco jeans I miss having phones that small
Ah, nostalgic! I loved the Firefox OS! I even preached about it to family and friends. Good times.
Unfortunately it never felt like a finished product.
What is this? A phone for ants?
I remember a time when all of the companies were striving to make cell phones as small as possible. But as soon as touch screens came out that trend reversed.
When we realized we could watch porn on them.
The nexus 5 was peak size for a phone imo, it’s a nightmare trying to find a decent 5" phone nowadays.
I got a oneplus one, that was good too
I want to see something like this but without the bezels
Iphone mini apparently is pretty good.
That size is discontinued
decent 5" android phone
Nexus 5 was just peak EVERYTHING for that time. Badass hardware, badass display, size, design, everything about it was amazing even if it had no fingerprint sensor until the Nexus 5X and 6P.
God I miss when they made phones with love.
People have been praising some smallish Asus thing lately
Reminds me of the original 3.5” iPhone. Absolutely tiny by todays standards.
I was thinking of getting one of these when they were very cheap. I really wanted FF OS and other alternatives to succeed or at least exist, because Android was just never very good and I foresaw how Google is just gonna abuse its monopoly and make life difficult for everyone.
But Mozilla was like “now it’s not the right time to introduce a mobile OS” - wtf, when if not exactly at the time when markets were still forming? It was now or never, and Mozilla threw in the towel so quickly it almost feels like someone got a nice paycheck from Google or something.
And while I never got that phone at the end, it did look like it had some decent basis and ideas in it that could’ve developed into something cool. Alas.
What ever happened to the Ubuntu mobile OS?
Canonical stopped development and ubports took over
I completely forgot Firefox had a phone.
Facebook has phones too back then, though they’re just Android with Facebook button.
Not long before Amazon came out with their spyware phone.
Seriously - they bragged about how the Fire Phone was always spying on you and still tried to charge $600 for it. Like three months later, they had to discount it to $99 and include a year of Prime.
This makes me nostalgic for my Palm Pre and webOS.
Me too. I loved webOS. Favorite phone I’ve ever had.
I wish so much that there was a solid Linux phone that was just as viable as any android-based device.
There are some options, but nothing that just works.
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The N9 was killed by Stephen Elop, the new CEO coming straight from Microsoft with a mission: get Nokia bought off by MS.
Right from the start, he ran an explicit counter-advertisement campaign against the N9 and Meego. Whatever commercial success it would be, this would be the first and last device running MeeGo from Nokia, and there would be no support for MeeGo.
Nokia was to embrace Windows mobile OS, that turned out to be a total disaster. But indeed, after he tanked Nokia, it became cheap enough to bought by MS, as Nokia got both cheap and undsirable by any other big player due to its binding to MS bad mobile OS, and Elop got his VP status back there.
This is a shame in the history of mobile phones and OS!
Later, some former Nokia would start their own phone company reusing part of MeeGo. Jolla was born.
Reminds me of the pre phone/tablet line with webOS and the way hp or better their short lived CEO Leo Apotheker killed it. That was such a shame great devices and great os.
I remember Ars Technica had an article or series on his bad decisions called “Apotheker needs an Apothecary” and lit into him for all the dumb things he was saying and doing. I just don’t see how you can have the manufacturing and branding behemoth HP was then, get giftwrapped Palm and webOS while RIM was still in the process of imploding, and fumble the bag so hard
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I still get mad at this. I had bought Nokias for most of my life and it was probably the biggest and best european tech company and it was destroyed by that idiot.
I resent him slightly less than the idiots who appointed him CEO. To be appointed, you need to come with a plan you present to the board. Who the hell thought “let’s destroy everything that made Nokia successful so far and become a Nth Windows Phone maker!” was a good strategy??
https://seekingalpha.com/article/916271-how-stephen-elop-destroyed-nokia
Symbian OS still had a very large user base and some support from large customers. The N9 and MeeGo was getting better reviews and customer satisfaction reports than Samsung and Apple’s phones! The obvious strategy was to navigate a transition between the legacy Symbian and a rising and promising MeeGo. But since his mandate was not to make Nokia successful but rather to have bought by MS, he could trash the business at will: made it cheaper for his real employer, MS.
Seriously, that guy should have been jailed!!
This situation was revolting in every way. They destroyed the best european tech company. They had everything. A music service, a maps service superior to Google Maps, mail service, everything. It was sickening.
I remember emulating it on my desktop.
