Heilmann: The Fox is out of the bag #FirefoxOS

The top of the line Blackberry was 320x240 not so long ago, IIRC. And you could read your mail, make calls, and browse the web. Web browsing is hard because of the incontinence of page authors putting up navigation bars, advertisements, pointless graphics and so on - but that problem doesn't entirely go away when you have more pixels, since you still have a small physical screen.

Ironically, the smaller the screen resolution, the more you really need native apps rather than web pages. While it's possible to write websites that are fast and usable on a 320x240 display, nobody really bothers to. A native app by definition is written to be usable on that particular hardware.