Hands-on with Mozilla’s Web-based “Firefox OS” for smartphones | Ars Technica

Setup and basic apps

When Mozilla sent us our GeeksPhone Keon, the company repeatedly emphasized that the phone was an experimental "developer preview" phone. It came with the nightly build of Firefox OS, meaning that we should expect more bugs than we'd find in a finished product. So in what follows, we're not going to do the kind of intensive quality review we'd do for a shipping consumer product, since the Geeksphones are not intended for ordinary consumers. We'll mostly skip reporting obvious bugs. There are a lot of these, but we anticipate that Mozilla will be able to fix most of them in the coming months. If they aren't fixed, we'll certainly tell you all about them when we review the finished product.

We're also not going to focus on the hardware, since the phones actually distributed to consumers probably won't use the same chips. But for the record, the phone we used, the Keon, is the less powerful of the two Geeksphone models. It has a Qualcomm Snapdragon S1 processor running at 1GHz, a 3.5-inch screen with a resolution of 480×320, and 512MB of memory. Not very beefy hardware.

When you start up a Firefox OS phone for the first time, it asks standard configuration questions. You are asked to choose a language, set a time zone, set up a Wi-Fi connection, and so forth.

The setup process has a few rough edges. For example, the list of time zones is a disorganized mess, with some cities listed by country ("Argentina/Buenos Aires") others listed by state ("Indiana/Winamac"), and still others listed alone ("New York"). Strangely, several major cities on the East Coast, including Baltimore, Washington, and my own city of Philadelphia, didn't make the cut (Denver, Detroit, and Chicago are on the list). So I had to pick "New York" as my time zone.

Once the phone was set up, we found that some of the core apps have achieved near-parity with their Android counterparts. The text message app works great. The camera app includes the ability to take videos, but it doesn't have all the "advanced" features found in the Android camera app. There's a "settings" app that works just as you'd expect it to.

Firefox OS has a solid phone app that includes mute and speakerphone functionality. Here's what the dialing screen looks like:

The mail client supports basic functionality, but a few important features are missing. For example, the e-mail search only searches e-mail that happens to be cached locally. If the message you're looking for is not among the few dozen most recent ones, you're out of luck. (You can manually load additional e-mails a few at a time but obviously this isn't a practical way to search your e-mail.)

One sign that Mozilla's engineers were hard at work: when we started experimenting with Firefox OS, the mail client didn't support adding attachments to e-mail. Now it does. Hopefully many of the other missing features we'll mention throughout this review will be added in the coming months.

In an interview with Ars, Mozilla CTO (and JavaScript inventor) Brendan Eich said that improving the search function was "on the roadmap," along with better handling of attachments like Microsoft Word and Excel. But he said these features were unlikely to make it into the initial version of the OS. "A lot of this is more important in the first world than emerging markets," he told us. Since emerging markets are Mozilla's initial target market, they've devoted most of their early engineering resources to other priorities.

Syncing, notifications, and media

The calendar works as expected. You can log into a Google, Yahoo, or CalDav account to sync with an online calendar. I had no trouble logging into my Google account for this purpose, and I could create and edit events as well as viewing them.

Firefox OS has a notification system very similar to the ones on Android and iOS. Notifications briefly appear as a banner across the top of the screen, as shown above. The number of pending notifications is shown in an icon in the upper-left hand corner. Just as on the leading smartphone platforms, a downward swipe reveals the list of pending notifications. The text message app uses notifications to signal new messages and the calendar app uses notifications for event reminders:

Not all apps appear to support notifications, however. The mail app doesn't seem to have the option to check e-mail in the background or to post notifications when new mail arrives. Similarly, the Twitter app (which we'll discuss more below) doesn't offer background fetching or notifications.

While support for calendar syncing is pretty good, support for syncing other kinds of information seems to be lacking. You can import contacts from Facebook or your SIM card, but not from Gmail or Apple's address book (the two places I personally keep my contacts).

To get music on the device, you have to plug it in, mount the phone as a USB drive, and manually copy your music onto the phone's flash card. At the moment, there doesn't seem to be any support for syncing music with cloud services such as Google Music or Amazon Cloud Player.

Once you load up music on a Firefox OS phone, the music-playing functionality works as you'd expect it to. It includes a traditional list view as well as a more attractive (if perhaps less practical) "album view" to show the covers of the albums for all your songs:

Firefox OS doesn't offer options for purchase or rental of movies, e-books, or other media. Eich said he expected this functionality to be provided by third-party apps, but he couldn't share any details. He did say that getting video streaming services like Netflix working on Firefox OS was a priority. "We need to have Netflix work well in certain locales," he told Ars. "We're going to have that work out of the box."