Gadgetory

okay xandred 30 were reporting live here from Barcelona at Mobile World Congress I'm here with Christian Hammond yes he's the html5 spokesperson sir with that with the Mozilla Foundation and he has a hands-on demo of the new Firefox OS we're gonna be taking a look and diving in so why don't you start talking about it what are we looking at here what you're looking at here is a Firefox OS device it's a very very low-level device basically do if I had Android on it the only Android that would still run is honeycomb okay so the idea of that one is that we bring web connectivity to people who cannot afford smartphones so we bring emerging markets like South America is where we're gonna start Eastern Europe so our idea of Mozilla as a foundation is to bring the web to people and if right now this means that you have to have a lot of money for a new smartphone every two months that's just not fair now so we thought it's a good idea to bring a platform into the play that could run on very very low spec hardware but still have a good performance of course you can't compare it with an with an with the nexus 4 right now or with an iPhone 5 but actually the idea is that we want to replace feature phones with this so we want to get rid of the old Nokia Samsung's Erickson's Motorola's people should be available it should be allowed to be on the web and use the social web and not only play snakes and send their people text messages course so everything you see here is html5 CSS HTML and and JavaScript all of it the operating system itself and the applications or everything else in there is a Linux core same Linux core that's under Android code conk and that gave us access to the hardware and that way we got the apps there you see all the apps that you would expect we got Facebook we got Twitter we got the Nokia Maps the wireless here's a bit flaky so sometimes it can take a while to load but these are Nokia Maps running on a device now which 156 Meg of RAM and a one gigahertz processor pretty impressed so that's pretty sweet the other thing we have is that we we are going to markets where people actually pay by the megabyte so seeing that all the apps are html5 they're much smaller than their equivalents in the Android Market so the good thing about that one is I don't have to actually install 32 max uh stuffs are tweeting I can just go on and Twitter and do that I also have a full control over how many how many things I've already used and how many things are how many of my megabytes are already used and what I used two months 3G or Wi-Fi and when I get into the one mag or something that engine starts getting ready I get alerts so I make sure that when I'm on roaming I'm not actually paying through my nose we have a marketplace much like anybody else so like the Android Marketplace or the iOS marketplace one main differentiator is that you buy the app once and you can install it on many many devices you want to undescore on tablets and on the phone because i myself i hate that i have to de-emphasize wanna browse one computer before I go to next month the really amazing thing though is that instead of having to go through marketplace as all of these things are html5 they can be indexed on the web as well which means we have this system here called dynamic app search so I can now search for a band like I can search for YouTube because I don't want to type many things in and you see in the background I got you two and it gave me the apps that are actually have content of you to like Grooveshark SoundCloud Wikipedia or YouTube or MetroLyrics and song cake so I did not need to know the names of the apps I just wanted to go from my content to the 2d app itself I can then click on the click on be a SoundCloud app for example I load the html5 mobile version of it to preview it I play with the app I play a song if I like the app then I can mate then I can keep it but I can actually just discard it as well so it's actually the same way as browsing the web we made app discovery and app usage as easy as using the web now if I like SoundCloud I can go back to that do a long click and basically just install it on my device as well so I can then install it to the home screen this work this is not a bookmark like it is on iOS this is actually just putting they're putting the app on my computer and doing all the cap caching as well it gets the data offline so next time when I'm there sound card is much faster cuz I don't have to don't look down with the interface anymore because it's already there for me so the benefit of all of this is that the phone will be very very cheap to achieve and it is actually updating constantly as well so I don't have the problem that a very low-end phone doesn't get newer versions of the operating system that quickly and we had we walked a lot with our partners we got 19 different providers that actually want to do read with us make up things like telefónica Telenor and others and we got four different hardware providers that want to build Firefox OS phones already the other benefit of course is if I got Firefox running on my Android any of these applications can be installed on my Android and run full screen as applications as well so when do we think we're gonna be seeing Firefox phones in a while though to go to market autumn is the thing that we're that our partners are going for we built the operating system we actually don't build the system itself okay but the main thing is right now as a developer I can pre I can get a geeks phone they can actually go to geeks phone log home you can buy one of those and test them out you can also flash Firefox OS on an older Androids like Nexus S and Nexus S 2 that's what we use as test devices before but the best way to actually get a cell phone with same specifications as a phone will be in the market is one getting one of those geeks phones you can build 90% of the app actually on your desktop as well because there's an emulator built into Firefox so you can do it on a Mac on Linux on on Windows wherever you want to use it so Firefox 4s is basically bringing the web to the phone rather than having the web as the last app on the phone that you just use when you don't find another answer so aside from Ceti can you share some information about the hardware partners the Harvard partisan alcatel-lucent then we have Sony just announced one Sonia Sonia you way announced one and LG LG oh that's fantastic it is very very cool that a year ago this was an empty folder on our desktop at two years ago one year ago we had a phone here that was a demo and now we got so many partners and basically the phones out it's really really nice to see I wish you all the best and we love your philosophy bringing more connectedness to you know the rest of the world that doesn't have the economic resources to the other day exactly thank you very much thank you for your time sir