Now that I’ve got a functioning Firefox OS phone, I need to get it up and working. That proves a little more challenging than I’d anticipated.
Feature phones have music players, cameras and maybe a game or two. They’re not very interesting.
Smartphones are smart because they have apps, and that expands the possibilities of what you can do with them immensely. There are apps on leading platforms right now that nobody would particularly thought of a “big” idea even a few years ago.
Don’t believe me? Instagram. Yelp. Uber. I could go on.
I’m planning to cover app diversity on Firefox OS tomorrow, but the first thing that I need to do with any smartphone is get the basics of any smartphone platform up and running; the information services such as email and social networking that form the basis of the majority of my phone communications.
I don’t actually make all that many phone calls, although I do take quite a few calls; in any case, as noted yesterday my issues with the ZTE Open’s overly tight full-sized SIM tray means I’m not risking it with a nano-SIM adaptor again.
On the social networking side, Firefox has the big players covered. There’s a Twitter app, and a Facebook app. They install quickly — but then they would, as there’s precious little about them that’s really an app. There’s a strong similarity in Firefox OS’s approach as there are with the various Chrome OS devices you can buy, because nothing is really an application on a device as much as it is a pointer to a web resource of some kind. As such, one nice factor here is that apps install astonishingly rapidly, even over a basic 3G connection.
Although at its loading speeds, it’s more like Faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa….c….e…..booooooo…kkk.
They don’t run so fast, I’m finding, and that’s making keeping up with social networking something of a chore. The ZTE OPEN’s 320×480 pixel display isn’t helping much there, but again I’ve got to remind myself that this is meant to be a budget phone. Nice pixels cost extra.
Email’s the other part of my necessary productivity flow, and here I hit a couple of very serious snags.
Firstly, the embedded email client doesn’t support POP3 in any way at all. My security-minded friends might breathe a sigh of relief at that, but it won’t suit everyone.
I can switch to IMAP — and I’ve tried — but there Firefox OS times out with security errors from a self-signed certificate. It’s the first time I’ve hit this problem with any smartphone device, and I suspect that it’s to do with Firefox following strict security rules that everyone else seems to ignore.
They’re probably right — this starts to get outside my own expertise zone, if I’m honest — but in a way that leaves me with no way to get my mail easily beyond forwarding it all through gmail (because that’s natively supported). That’s less than optimal, especially as it leaves me with few options for replying in a way that doesn’t shift the return over to my gmail address.
I could opt for a pure webmail play, but there the completely-online nature of Firefox OS creates a new problem. Nothing is cached, which means that even logging into a webmail portal is an exercise in screen refreshing and waiting for the Gecko engine to actually render each page. It’s slow, and it’s irritating, and I knew that switching to a very cheap phone would involve a certain amount of lag — but this veers strongly into the unworkable for my needs.
Sigh. I guess I knew this wouldn’t be easy when I decided to do it. Is it too late to switch to a cheap Android or WP8 handset?
Yesterday: Budget Phone Week: Can I survive on Firefox OS?
Tomorrow: Can Firefox OS keep me ‘appy?
Thursday: I see what you did there: Screens, cameras and entertainment
Friday: Do we really “need” fast phones?