Don’t get too happy though, I’ll tell you why.
Its cheap. Its HELLA cheap. But it aint what they call cheerful.
At this year’s Mobile World Congress, Mozilla is marching on on its self-appointed mission to prove to world that a perfectly-working cheap smart phone can be launched into the market and will be well received. Built by chip partner Spreadtrum, it runs the latest version of Firefox OS, but unfortunately does so with considerably more lag than the new generation of handsets introduced by Mozilla’s partners. The basic spec is reminiscent of the original iPhone, with a 3.5-inch, 320 x 480 display, 2-megapixel camera, and no 3G connectivity. That’s where the similarities end, however, as the Firefox OS prototype uses a quite terrible LCD display and offers a maddeningly slow user experience.
The sacrifices the phone makes look absolutely justified for the price at which it is offered. But then comes the question, can it really be called a smart phone then? You can browse the web, play games and even watch YouTube on it, but the performance of the phone is so snail-slow that you’d rather watch paint dry than do any of those things.
This phone is for those who cannot even afford Nokia’s entry-level Asha phones. It has room for a pair of SIM cards, and though its physical design isn’t indicative of what retail units will look like, it’s built to a reasonable standard. The hardware platform could scale lower, too, with options of 2.6-inch QVGA displays allied to a BlackBerry-esque QWERTY keyboard. In essence, these are 2014’s bargain-priced recreations of 2007’s best phones — or they would be if the user experience weren’t as disappointing as it is today.
Though lets not judge a phone by its hardware, because this is still a prototype and Mozilla might really out-do themselves and make this work in some way 😀