30 Apr 2013

Firefox OS — geeksphone Peak

On tuesday last week, geeksphone started to sell smartphones running Firefox OS so… I bought one.

There are two models:

• Keon (1 GHz, 521 MB RAM, 4 GB ROM, 8.9 cm screen, HSPA)
• Peak (1.2 GHz dualcore, 512 MB RAM, 4 GB ROM, 10.9 cm screen, HSPA)

Those phones are "developer preview", which may sound like "they currently suck so it's not for everybody", but anyway, it's a good thing to see that there is a lot of interest in a more open mobile platform (geeksphone went out of stock just hours after opening the shop).

I received my Peak yesterday:

I had a quick tour and here is my first impression (I may be wrong on some stuff since I used it just for a couple of hours):

• Firefox OS
  • Setup process has only a few steps, which is good, but is long because I had to setup time manually. Considering that the phone was connected to the local Wi-Fi and has a GPS chip I was expecting to only have to selection my region/country (and get time through NTP) or tell the phone to "guess" my current time based on my location (using the GPS location and time). Some UI stuff in that part are a bit awkward too (like the next button that was hidden by the keyboard).
  • E-Mail application can't use email discovery configuration through SRV records in DNS (like Thunderbird, same issue probably), so I had to enter my mail configuration manually…
  • …but it didn't work. Looks like there is a problem to handle STARTTLS command. So I can't read my emails on Firefox OS' mail client.
  • Configuring a GMail/Google Apps account in E-Mail application works just fine.
  • There is CalDAV support in the Calendar application! But here again, no discovery configuration, I entered the configuration manually but I didn't manage to connect successfully (looks like invalid certificate for HTTPS is the problem… and I'm not going to buy one for myself). Again, Google Apps Calendar was configured simply and works.
  • Looks like it's not possible to remove the "offline" (local I assume) calendar from the Calendar application.
  • Contacts application does not support CardDAV… so no contacts for me 😟.
  • In overall Firefox OS does not feel very responsive (while scrolling for instance), a bit less reponsive than my iPhone 3GS for instance (but much more responsive than my iPhone 3G), the keyboard is too slow/imprecise.
  • The styling is very polished in some places and very raw in others.
  • No fucking activation required!!!
  • I took a couple of pictures but their metadata contained a date around 11 years ago.
  • Music player reads mp3 properly, ogg vorbis (but seems to have some tag issues) but doesn't read flac and m4a.
• Geeksphone Peak hardware
  • The plastic looks nice (expect for the buttons) but feels cheap (but a 400 € Samsung Galaxy S3 is not much better).
  • Accessories are really cheap.
  • The screen is a bit too "grippy".
  • The screen is not too bright so it's a bit hard to watch in a bright environment.
  • Otherwise the screen is nice (much better than the one on my iPhone 3GS).
  • Only 2 GB of ROM is reported instead of 4 GB.

So, is it ready for mass market? Clearly not yet, but it looks promising (even if I'm a bit dubious on some choices that have been made).

Next step? Put a SIM card in it 😉.

If you want to have a look at Firefox OS, you can install Firefox OS simulator.