(Previous post: What is Firefox OS all about?)
Hardware
To get this out of the way first: this is clearly intended to be the lowest-end device that Firefox OS apps will need to support. It’s distinctly bargain-basement.
By far the best thing about this hardware is its soft-touch orange plastic rear cover, which is nice to look at and delightful to grip.
(Digression: it’s interesting how many expensive smartphones are unpleasant to hold. The iPhone 4 and 5 are sharp and angular, Samsung’s premium phones feel alien and tacky, and Nokia’s Windows Phone devices that I have encountered have been either very hard around the corners or grossly big. HTC is the one company that seems to have focused on how to make a phone feel natural in the hand. Not that it’s done them any good in the market.)
The loudspeaker isn’t bad, in a kitchen radio sort of way. The headphone jack is not so good. The battery is removable; the mini-SIM and micro-SD card slots are easily reached.
The worst thing about it, by “modern” standards, is the screen—but then, good screens are expensive. My first impression was pretty bad because the first thing I tried to do with it was use it outside on a sunny day. That doesn’t work so well.
Basics of the OS
Starting up and running a current Firefox OS build (as of June 2013) is pretty painless. It boots quickly into a sensible homescreen arrangement. An over-the-air update arrived just after the phone did, and installed without trouble. SIM and SD card are recognised, it makes calls and sends texts, and the wifi is more stable than my usual phone. (Much of this stuff is borrowed back from Android.)
The browser is as you’d expect from Firefox; there’s a Nokia maps app—though I didn’t manage to get it to recognise my location—; app installation from the marketplace is painless. Not that there’s much to install, and I’ve no idea how billing will work, as it seems to be free apps only at the moment.
It works well as a music player. My kids rapidly requisitioned it for that purpose, resulting in embarrassment at work the next day when I hit the wrong button and got Harlem Shake at top volume. Kids, what were you thinking? That song is over four months old!
Email is easy to set up and pleasant to use.The camera’s crap, but the camera app appears to be OK.
Angry Birds is not available.
UI design
I’ve no idea how provisional the general design of Firefox OS is, but I like the basics. You get a homescreen with a clock, a few quick access buttons, and your wallpaper. Swipe one way to get a grid of installed apps, the other way to get the marketplace. Swipe down for the now-traditional translucent notifications pane. It’s simple and it works fine. I like it.
Navigation design within apps is less satisfying. The sheer inclusiveness of a browser-app-based phone means that many apps are not going to be well-adapted to a common platform design. The principle seems to be, mainly, to hope that there’s enough in common amongst mobile versions of websites to avoid too much user confusion.
There are a lot of half-width buttons at screen edges, which I assume are intended to take advantage of the fact that there’s more “effective” touchable space there. That works, kind of, but the Keon’s touchscreen isn’t responsive enough for me to trust it. (Similarly, using the on-screen keyboard is something I anticipate without much joy.)
Scrolling and transitions are currently just functional. There’s no bounce scrolling, and kinetic scrolling sometimes stops working or works only in one direction. Interactions like these are sometimes jerky. I have confidence in the Mozilla developers’ ability to sort out things like this.
Firefox OS is unusual in using a distinctly humanist font. Appropriately, it seems to be an evolution of the “anti-Helvetica,” FontFont Meta, from the same designer (Erik Spiekermann). The Firefox version (called Feura) is tuned for small-screen legibility, and it looks lovely. I do worry that I might tire of it; the less mechanical and more distinctive a font, the more likely it is to wear you out eventually. Let’s see.
Would I buy it?
Er, I did buy it.
But would I buy it as my only phone?
Not at the moment. There’s potential, though, and I think it may depend on how practical I was feeling. You might expect this to be a fun toy that isn’t particularly useful, but the opposite is true: it would be quite workable for down-to-earth business use, it just currently isn’t that much fun to use. Still, if my other phone died, I could certainly get by with this one.
Hardware-wise, I’d quite like a phone from this manufacturer, with this case, with fancier screen and innards. It’s not the most elegant object, but I do rather like it.
But this isn’t a consumer product, it’s a developer device.
Will the platform succeed?
Here I’m moderately optimistic.
I hope improvements are possible to the general slickness and smoothness of the device, because there’s definitely some work to be done there. But the functional basics are sound, and I think the fact that your business is already developing for this device (almost) could work out for it.
The OS seems designed to be minimally obstructive for everyday communications work, and it is complete enough to do that work. I appreciate it and I am keen to mess with it. Anyone know what audio recording and playback latencies are like?
The Breakfast Post 