A couple of months ago I wrote about having bought a Geeksphone Keon, one of the early developer devices for FirefoxOS. I haven’t done much—all right, any—developing with it, but I have continued to use it and update it occasionally on the Firefox 1.2 developer track.

Some of the changes so far:

• Navigation and browsing have got quite a bit faster, kinetic scrolling is improved, and the on-screen keyboard has become more reliable. There’s evidently been a lot of tuning going on. As a pure web-browsing experience, this device is now really nice.
• I wrote, “Anyone know what audio recording and playback latencies are like?” — well, it turned out that audio capture was not supported at all in the device as shipped. Support is now appearing in the Gecko 26 release branch which Firefox OS 1.2 will be based on, and basic audio input works on my device now.
• Strangely, the on-screen keyboard has changed from showing a mixture of caps and lower case (i.e. lower case on each key until you hit Shift, then switching to caps), as on Android devices, to showing only caps as on iOS. I wonder why?
• The 1.2 track isn’t all that reliable at the moment. For example the email client doesn’t work on my device, though that doesn’t actually bother me because the Fastmail browser interface works very well on it. Screen rotation seems to be taking a holiday, and the notifications pulldown doesn’t always want to go away when I ask it to. Very interesting to keep an eye on though.