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Comment by wcummings | Hacker News Reader

I picked one of these up because it was $80 unlocked, well w/in impulse buy range, and anyone w/ some webdev chops can churn out an app w/o learning [STUPID DEV STACK THAT DOESNT WORK ANYWHERE ELSE].

I wish there was some slicker FFOS hardware, but I like where the platform is going

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It's also great if you want to go to a foreign country, or if (like me) have to visit back your native one. It has good battery usage, and it works pretty good for it's purpose (phone first). for $50 the best I could find was very old design phones (back in Buglaria) that looked a lot worse than the $80 deal from FFOS (and they were locked at that, while ZTE is open).

So I think the PRICE should be taken very seriously here. I love my Nexus, and I love my wife's iPhone, and my friends' fancy Samsung, etc. - but each one of them is multiple times more expensive than the ZTE Open.

And it might finally make me start develop more for the web (did too much C/C++ over the years).

You're right, the price is crucial. It's silly to compare it to an iPhone which costs hundreds of dollars unlocked.

And how is HTML any better?

This is a good example : http://fb.html5isready.com/ a fairly sophisticated facebook application in HTML. It's barely usable on my Lumia 920 (IE10), barely usable on my BlackBerry Z10 (webkit based browser) and doesn't even render properly on a Nexus 7 2012 (Firefox). All these are pretty powerful devices.

Doesn't look like HTML is working everywhere as people claim.

Moto G with Firefox. Header renders but has graphical errors. Main body of page doesn't render at all. html5isready? Funny.

I just go to facebook.com with firefox on the nexus 7 and it just works waaaaaaaaay better than this website you refer.

So.. I don't think it's an HTML problem. Turns out, facebook.com also works great on my desktop browser.

That was built in a couple of days as a demonstration, it's not a production-quality app.

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