Today 10 years ago I went to Poland to buy a Phone with pre installed #Firefox OS on. The Phone was a Alcatel One, so very shitty. Two years later I installed Firefox OS on my Nexus 5 instead.
It was a very good concept, but sadly rolled out on too shitty hardware so it never caught on.
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I recently flexed on some nerds when I whipped out my Zaurus
Based. Do you have a picture?
I wanted to get the clamshell version of one of those a while back, turns out they’re quite expensive (£300) though
For the curious people, Firefox OS kept living in a way, being used as the foundation for KaiOS, which was a smart operative system for “dumb” phones. This one took off in certain parts of the world.
Am I the only one that misses a thick bezel?
Sometimes, makes using a tablet easier & I liked “chins” on iphone for the fingerprint reader.
I still want to go back to my Moto G6. The fingerprint reader on the chin is perfect. It replaced all the buttons so I didn’t need the virtual chin or finicky edge gestures.
Thick bezels are great for actual comfortable usage, but they don’t look sexy so they’re no more
It’s nostalgic for sure, but from a UX perspective I am so happy with the edge to edge displays.
My only gripe is that they work best with at least a little Bezel. Too little side bezel especially, and the edges of your palms will give you false input. Incredibly annoying.
The iPhones have been really good with this thankfully.
That being said, I fucking love my Galaxy S5. I miss the days of rooting and custom roms on practically every android device.
Isn’t the software supposed to correct for such false input in most cases?
Sometimes. Depends on the vendor really. Samsung sucks at it.
I definitely miss simple rectangle displays. Curved corners and notches annoy me to the point of giving me anxiety. For bezels, one can at least put the phone in a case.
Do you actually get anxiety from a curved corner or was that just hyperbole?
I do lol. I got used to it on my phone because they’re so tiny and it’s a taller screen than 16:9, so it doesn’t cut into videos and such. But on a PC screen I wouldn’t stand it.
I also can’t stand the rounded squares buttons that are now “standard” in Android. I keep a lot of apps out of date just because the newer versions changed circles to that abomination. I even asked the dev of Infinity for Lemmy to bring the option for circle button, and they did! 😃
Nobody understands my suffering lol.
Lol I really don’t. I am trying to figure out what condition would lead to actual anxiety for something like this.
I think I hate it mostly because 1) it needlessly ruins a good thing, 2) of the general implications of “we are changing something fundamental like a rectangle, and make it standard, and you can’t do anything about it”.
And also the general corporatisation of design. Everything has to be lifeless and smooth and just enough friendly and appealing to everyone. So what we get? A mix between a circle and rectangle. My artsy soul is crying.
So, it’s dumb and pointless, it ruins a good thing, it offends me, I hate it, and yet I’m somehow supposed to accept it as the new standard? Fucking 1984 this is.
I don’t know if this is satire or serious.
Of serious, I envy your life. I wish my lifewas privileged enough that I could focus on hating rounded corners as much as you. Lol
Are you on the internet? Then you are probably not a starving child in some Somalian village. You privilege.
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They’re coming back. The Galaxy S 23/22 Ultra both are squared.
Still a hole punch tho
You can still get phones like the pixel 7a, which has thick bezels, so I’d say they aren’t completely gone from the market yet.
Unfortunately they still won’t put in a headphone jack which is a deal breaker for me. It’s a real shame because i would otherwise really like a pixel phone.
My Pixel 4a 5G has a headphone jack.
I wrap my $1200 piece of hardware in a good case. Basically gives me a bezel. Check out the OtterBox Commuter.
That’s what bugs me about modern phone design, though. They could put Otterbox-type protection right on the phone and that’d be fine for most people. Personally have an S23 and I think it’s unnecessarily ugly, thin, and easy to drop, when it’s not in a case.
Samsung has their XCover and Active lines; They’re just not flagships.
I don’t mind it, gives me the choice of whether to put a big bulky case on it. Personally I like it but I understand not wanting to use one.
I also don’t mind having the choice of whether or not to use a case, but it might be nice if it were an included accessory.
I’m so cheap, this one plus nord POS for 250 suits me pretty good, comes with a case and screen protector sticker from the factory. I’m more thrilled to have a regular headphones port and memory card slot.
Rad! I just threw ubuntu touch on my nexus 6p… Far from perfect, but a great premise of a new era!
How much functionality is left on that phone?
Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Seemed like a silly endeavor by Mozilla.
I miss my nexus 6 shamu. I think that phone was the best that Google ever made even to this day.
My Nexus 6 was the worst phone I’ve ever had. It aged like milk. It was so bad I jumped off Google phones and never went back. Getting the OnePlus 3T was like breathing fresh air again.
Edit: had the Nexus S and Nexus 4 before the 6, loved those phones… So jumping off Nexus was no small matter.
I’ve had android phones since the G1. The Nexus One was pretty freaking sweet, but my favorite phone of all time was either the Nexus S or the Nexus 5x. The curved screen on the S was great and it fit into the back pocket of my pants “like a glove”.
I still have mine in a drawer. Sure newer phones are taller but that thing was fucken WIDE. It felt more like a small tablet. I don’t know if it’s right to say that Google made it though; really it was made by Motorola
Same here; I’ve got mine in a box along with my Pixel XL, Nexus 5, and Moto X (which feels like a tiny Nexus 6). I tried the Nexus 6 for a few hours about a year ago, and it was still surprisingly snappy. I have a Note 20 Ultra for my daily driver, and it still feels small compared to the girth of the Nexus 6. I feel like I could possibly use it today, which is one of the reasons I keep it around, in case of an emergency.
So sad it didn’t take off, I would love to have an alternative to Android or iOS right now
I forgot this even existed. I had the HTC One and/or Galaxy S4 around this time.
Loved my HTC One
I never understood why they targetted low end hardware with a tech stack that’s notoriously slow (web).
This was exactly my (dumb, layman) view of things - great idea hobbled from the outset by the marriage of slow web apps with slower hardware.
To keep it affordable?
Then use something more efficient than the web stack. In the end, Android ran better on the same devices and had better software support.
Wish something like that would come back.
Same, having competitors to Android and iOS would be great.
There’s a Linux phone, but I’ve heard it is a beautiful mess.
We have GNU/Linux on smartphones now. There is PinePhone and Librem 5. Some Android phones can run GNU/Linux too.
The are some alternatives out there. Calling them competitive might be a stretch though.
I had a Windows Phone (NOT the older Windows Mobile) for a while back around 2011 thanks to my job as a multi-platform mobile developer. I loved that phone and the OS and developing apps for it was a lot easier and faster than for Android or iOS. I was surprised at how quickly Microsoft kicked the whole thing to the curb.
Nokia Lumia 700 in bright blue was stunning! I really liked it, the tiles were different and it felt funky. Pity they abandoned the project.
BlackBerry OS 10 was my favourite one. They way it used widgets and gestures was really cool. Hub application was awesome. Android and iOS copied a lot of it later but I liked how simple and minimalistic BBOS10 was compared to them. Never tried developing for it though.
Had a BB10 Z10, loved that phone! It was a but sluggish to be sure but I was gutted when they pulled the plug.
Developing for BB was a complete nightmare. Despite the fact that you write in Java, the app still had to be compiled and deployed onto a device for testing out any code changes (the emulators were worthless) and the compiled app had to be digitally signed - by servers that were often/usually down, so sometimes you’d change literally one line of code and then have to wait 45 minutes to test it. Or sometimes you’d just give up and go home.
And the standard app components were shit. The only time I enjoyed coding for BB was when I wrote a TV guide type of app using the basic Java graphics classes and drawing everything on the screen with my own code. I was actually extremely surprised by how powerful and flexible BB processors were. You’d never have any idea of that from using the standard apps.
I never liked the touch stuff for BB, though, and they were in their death throes when that stuff came out anyway (the worst was that model where you pressed in the entire screen to click). For me the old track wheel was absolutely brilliant since it allowed extremely precise control over the cursor. And hey, they had 16-bit color!
But that was the old OS, right? Not the BB 10? I’m talking about phones like Q10, they were completely different from the old phones with cursors.
The phones were different but the development process was the same.
We have PinePhone and Librem 5 now.
It’s KaiOS now, completely independent from Mozilla
People talk about FFOS like it was a failed project while in reality it was successfully commercialized and is so popular it has a native WhatsApp client. It has ~70x more users than LineageOS. Maybe Mozilla didn’t knew how to make money out of it but it’s definitely was a great OS project.
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IDK, I still like them. Definitely still managing not be evil. And keep in mind they are competing with multi-billion $ corporations that pretty much control how the web works today. Google (and others of course) first turned the web into ad funded business and then used their huge ad revenue to build a really good browser and promoted it using shady practices. What was Mozilla supposed to do? Sometimes simply having better software is not enough.
I always thought it’d be more of a feature phone type os. Couldn’t compete with what Android had to offer to the mainstream Western market at the time using primarily HTML, but I’m glad to find out that is what it turned into.
KaiOS runs on feature phones, with some advanced stuff like WiFi, 4G net and an app store. It should run on low-end smartphones, but I don’t think any have been released yet.
there are a few like postmarketos and ubuntu touch for specific phones, among others
i really hope these alt-mobile OS’s take off, i know theres things like pinephone and kde mobile but they’re still a little bit rough around the edges last i checked… at the same time tho maybe i should do some more digging around. i imagine someone’s made a daily-driveable alternate OS for phones at this point
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What sorcery is this?
I remember when Ubuntu for phones was hyped so big, then it fell flat…
can you still get that
Yep https://ubuntu-touch.io/ . Rolling out LTS 20.04 for their supported phones at the moment.
I remember this, we had one phone in our country with it, but it was such a terrible phone. And now FirefoxOS is KaiOS…
I have a KaiOS phone made by Nokia. As a functional phone, it’s ok only if you just make calls or texts.
I also have a KaiOS phone, to have a dumb phone with Whatsapp. Did you come from the /r/dumbphones community too? ;-)
Nope. I bought it years ago as my spare phone for emergency use.
