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Comment by tmilard | Hacker News Reader

Personnally, I would also love to have a second phone like this one. Cheap, simple, just to "phone&browse". No apps.

I live in France

Not to be rude, but what stops you from buying an old android phone/iphone 3GS/any older windows phone? I can almost guarantee that they will be faster for browsing than any of these new ultra-cheap Firefox OS running phones.

You might think that, but you've got to be careful not to let old phones update. I've got a Galaxy S2 I use mainly as a wifi hotspot with a data-only sim, and while it used to have a pretty snappy UI, these days it really crawls, almost to the point of being unusable.

To be honest I've not looked particularly hard at why this is, but how well a phone runs a browser, for instance, isn't frozen in time when the phone is bought.

You are absolutely right, but a phone that is few years old and has 512MB of ram is going to load pages faster than this new $35 firefox OS phone which only has 128MB.

Could go either way, I reckon. I've got no idea what the relative CPU speeds are, for a start. At some point the newer phone will start to make sense.

Not letting your phone update maybe isn't a great solution if you care about security at all.

Users shouldn't have to choose between 'affordable' and 'currently supported'; I hope Firefox OS can help here.

You're absolutely right - it's a real pain.

I recently got a KitKat phone, and felt instantaneously trapped in Google Play land (no improvement over Apple Appstore I guess), not a good feeling. A 'web' based OS would be a nice thing to try.

What's the difference between Android with a web browser and a Firefox OS phone? Literally nothing.

And people ignored WebOS when it was released in favor of Android, even though WebOS used HTML and Javascript for apps and was so hackable you could load a new kernel over USB, and Palm themselves gave you directions how on their official website.

Well, Android Apps run on Dalvik/ART, which is not HTML5/js but I agree, it's not a real difference, except in FirefoxOS marketing strategy, targetting ultra low end devices with heavy (heavier than ART) apps will result in an absurdly unusable system.

Well what I was trying to say is, Firefox OS apps are just web pages. Saying that an Android user is locked into the Play store unlike a Firefox OS user seems silly, because you don't need a single Android app installed to mimic the functionality of Firefox OS. All you need is the browser.

No, because Firefox OS apps are web pages with benefits :)

In particular, they can be bundled to be used offline, and they can get access to a whole host of device APIs, which I don't believe are accessible to any web apps on Chrome for Android: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Build/App_permissio...

An Android phone is actually quite usable without Google's app store, using alternatives like F-Droid and Amazon. You can't say that about an iOS or Windows phone.

Good point. I forgot about non Google Play 'distribution'. I just wish it was the norm :)

I purchased a developer Peak when they first came out. I used it as my primary phone for about a month on two different occasions when I was between phones.

In theory it was nice to just have a basic, but in practice I had to tether it to my computer or Nexus 7 for anything more than a quick text or Facebook message. The OS isn't there yet (though 2.0 is getting there) and the touchscreen is a thing that constantly needed to be fought against.

What I found I was really longing for was a small dumbphone that had LTE so I could tether when I needed to get work done/browse the web

Go to your local Leclerc or Darty, or by at LDLC, CDiscount, etc :)

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