Thoughts from a Bafta nominated Podcaster, Blogger, Writer and Commentator.
Nathaniel Mott, PandoDaily: Anyone intending to compete with iOS or Android ends up relying on Web technologies, he said, and that depends on the improvement of open standards. Companies like Apple and Google try to create “walled gardens” to lock their customers into their ecosystems; Mozilla is trying to create an open field in which Web developers can frolic without fear of being tied to one operating system or another.
Been tinkering with the Firefox OS powered Keon for a week now, and you can find my write-up over on Forbes: Dusting down my HTML5 skills, I have to agree with Heilmann. The Keon, although it shows a huge amount of promise, is not a handset you would hand to a family member or recommend to a colleague in the office. What it will give you is a head start in developing HTML5 apps optimised for the Firefox OS platform. Mozilla are banking on this being a platform with a huge amount of reach, and now is the time to
Snapdragon S1 1Ghz, 512 Mb RAM, MicroSD support… and it runs Firefox OS. This should be fun. Developer preview units are going to be available early February. It’s a short run of hardware, following the mould of sports car manufacturing with a strong brand name behind it (think of the limited runs that Ferrari do), and I can’t wait to see how the OS works in the real world. The question of getting it up to scale is a tougher one, but not one for the geeks and hackers to address at the moment. Right now it’s about sorting out the
“The goal is that Firefox OS shows that the Web can be a viable alternative to proprietary applications,” [Director of Research Andreas] Gal said. As the major websites online turn away from HTML to native code on smartphones, why is Mozilla’s Firefox OS pushing it as one of the main selling points? More to the point, there have been countless little mobile OS projects like this (such as Save JE), what makes this one special… beyond name recognition?
