FirefoxOS phone beta testing
I got my FirefoxOS phone and am doing some testing on FirefoxOS 1.1 beta. I’m about to switch over to using it as my primary phone, but so far I’ve just used its apps and web connection. It seems very responsive and fast.
My friend Tiziana and I compared phones. Hers is the orange one, a ZTE phone running OPEN_US_DEV_FFOS_V1.0.0B1. Mine is green and is from Alcatel, running FirefoxOS 1.1.0.0-prerelease. I definitely notice the difference in the new version of the OS in that it is more responsive and I feel more sure in control of the touchscreen. Typing works well. I miss having something to swipe across the letters so I hope an open source version of type-by-swipe is something in the works.
I have installed a few art and drawing apps as well as games. The only game I’ve tried so far is Little Alchemy, which was very buggy in earlier versions this spring, but works beautifully now.
Email setup worked great, browsing is good, I’ve been taking photos and emailing them. I’ve used the Wikipedia app to look things up, and the “I’m thinking of…” search feature to listen to music on the bus. The Music app comes pre-loaded with some albums but I haven’t figured out a good way to load my own music onto the phone. On the other hand I haven’t needed to since “I’m thinking of…” gets me decently fast connections to YouTube and other music sources.
One nice touch with this was that when I bring up my “I’m thinking of” Janelle Monae search the wallpaper background of my search screen changes to a giant aweseome photo of Monae in a tuxedo and I am offered the things on my phone to do with the search on top, then under a hairline divider, searches on Monae in many other categories like free music, Grooveshark, Google, Twitter, her official website, tickets, Amazon, and so on. Here’s what it looks like:
That’s different from my usual mental model of “search”. The result is interesting and, I think, powerful and useful. I’ll be exploring it over the next few days at the Mozilla Summit. And of course reporting bugs, but for now, I just wanted to share that the phone not only quite usable as a smartphone, it’s exciting to explore.