Flame Review

Having played around with the Firefox OS reference phone, the T2 Flame, for some days now it’s time for a short review:

Hardware

• Build quality is ok-ish but but great. The phone feels solid but should be both lighter and thinner.
• The screen is ok-ish, too. However the touch panel is quite bad. It has a very cheap plastic feel and it often fails to register touches.
• Vibration is strong but very noisy.
• Volume button is on the “wrong” side (this is very subjective I guess but to me it just feels wrong). Having the power button on the top feels strange, too.
• Not a problem with the hardware itself but not being a common device there are no cases for this device. At least you can find screen protectors.

OS Software

• The phone shipped with Firefox OS 1.3 but Mozilla offers builds for Firefox OS 2.0, 2.1, 2.2 and even 3.0. Here begins one of the main problems with Firefox OS: While versions 2.0 and 2.1 should be “code complete” for some time now (even 2.2 is nearing code completion), they have not been formally released. I don’t know what Mozilla plans in this regard, but to me the situation regarding updates looks even worse than Android at the moment.
• On the bright side, the Firefox OS itself is much better than what I expected. It generally looks very nice and runs smooth. Going from 1.3 to 2.2 shows some very nice improvements as well.
• The system only makes use of a single device button. A short press brings you back to the home screen,  a longer press opens a task switcher. This is probably what Apple users would expect but I really miss Android’s back button.
• No support for USB-OTG.
• Besides the system launcher there is a number of apps. They all look good and work fine. There is still a lot room for improvements, though. For example, the contacts app only supports syncing with Facebook. Would it be that hard to support CardDAV sync? Maybe some future update will bring this functionality as the calendar app already supports CardDAV sync.
• Surprisingly the weakest point of Firefox OS seems to be… Firefox! The browser does not even support sync let alone addons and tabbed browsing is hardly usable. There is A LOT to do here, Mozilla!

Addon software

• More apps can be installed from the market app, which works very well. However the amount of useful apps is very small.
• There is a calculator app written by Mozilla, I wonder why it was excluded from the official ROM.
• Sadly there is neither TextSecure nor WhatsApp for Firefox OS. There are some WhatsApp compatible apps but I would really like to use apps with official support. Come on Mozilla, messaging is one of the main uses of a phone and most people are no longer using SMS. Thinking about it, Mozilla should really team up with WhatsApp and bundle its app with Firefox OS. This way Firefox OS users would have easy  access to a widely used messaging platform and WhatsApp would get new users.

Bottom line

It is always interesting to explore a new OS and it is very nice to see that Mozilla is doing great work. However there is much to do:

• The web browsing experience needs to be improved a lot.
• Mozilla needs to win support from some of the more popular app developers like WhatsApp.
• Security. Even the yet unreleased Firefox OS 2.1 is based on Gecko 34, which is old. Replacing Gecko in Firefox OS seems to be hard because the whole system UI runs on top of it, so everything needs to be tested. I do not know how Mozilla plans to solve this problem but I really hope they come up with something, soon.