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What's the point?What's the point?Posted Mar 8, 2012 9:59 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: What's the point? by kragil Parent article: Mozilla announces HTML5-based phone
As I see it B2G is a smart phone platform for very cheap third world phones. IOW: for the field which is totally owned by Android today. By relying on HTML5 only the phones can potentially have fairly low specs and therefore be very cheap. Well, this remains to be seen. HTML5 technologies are many things, but “low specs” they are not (on desktop you may need ~200MB just to use one complex webapp like GMail). The fact that B2G was demoed on a system with specs identical to HTC Dream (which supported all the latest Android goodies till ICS was released) does not mean finished system will be able to run adequately on such SOC. And you still need to prove that “obsolete, yet still widely used” Gidgerbread is worse then “brand-spanking new, but empty B2G phone”. Third world may like cheap phones, but it likes Angry Birds as well. Sure, there are HTML5-based one today, but it remains to be seen how many developers will port their goodies to HTML5/B2G (desktop webapps, sadly, are not all that usable on touchscreen device). Theoretically the smallest platform for a smart phone is just the browser, because that is the one component you cannot leave out. Have the B2G developers learned nothing? This is repeat of 20 years old battle: while Lotus developers tried to squeeze Lotus 1-2-3 in 640K Microsoft added features to Excel. Two years later Lotus went from “market leader” to “also run”. And B2G is not even a market leader today… Also HTML5 "should" be the safer choice if you don't want to be sued for extortion money from patent trolls like Appl€ and M$ etc. Perhaps you meant Oracle? There are more then enough things in B2G-phone for “Appl€ and M$”. My personal POV: B2G released four years ago (in 2007) had the potential to take the world by storm. Today… the opportunity is just not there anymore.
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What's the point? Posted Mar 8, 2012 12:01 UTC (Thu) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link]
As you're getting into specific specs: The devices Telefonica used for their deoms were weaker than those Mozilla used for the demos with Gaia UI (Samsung Galaxy S II in the latter case). Still, all those are of course demo setups and there's a couple of performance improvements still to be made.
That said, Android needs ~300MB for the base system, B2G needs ~100MB. So there's a real chance that B2G can be more performant on low-spec devices than Android.
What's the point? Posted Mar 8, 2012 12:44 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] That said, Android needs ~300MB for the base system, B2G needs ~100MB. So there's a real chance that B2G can be more performant on low-spec devices than Android. Android only started requiring ~300MB when nice UI features were added in ICS. You can still run older versions - and they will work just fine.
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