Alcatel One Touch Fire E / Firefox OS - Retrospective

My first Firefox OS device was the Geeksphone Revolution. Hardware wise it was a quite nice device, but the size just didn’t fit my hand and so I droped it a few times until the display was broken.

At that time - beginning of 2015 - I rather tended to go with anohther Firefox OS phone. Luckily the Alcatel One Touch Fire E got introduced at that time and I went with it (paying around € 120,-).

So, now, a few months later I need to send in my device because the touchscreen does take my touches anymore. In the light of Matej’s earlier post I take the occassion to share my experienceswith Firefox OS 1.3 (and later 1.4).

Some good:

  • Firefox OS is simple - Nothing is really deeply nested, or I hadn’t had any trouble figuring stuff out
  • The camera app was fine, the fotos were actually quite good - but it was simple
  • The battery runtime was quite good, 2 days at normal usage, or half a day at full-time usage.
  • Tethering was actually working remarkably well over USB and wireless (hotspot-mode)
  • The Alcatel phone itself was a quite nice piece of hardware
  • Considering that Mozilla started from scratch, they did an awesome job to deliver the experience you have today on Firefox OS

Some bad:

  • The browser was quite fast to render, but to simple. No privacy tabs, tabs in general were hard to close, I missed the read mode several times every week.
  • The lack of decent apps - It’s surely a chicken and an egg problem, but maybe Motzilla could consider to provide supported apps for the “most important” apps on Android, to enable Firefox OS users to communicate with their Android peers (I’m mainly looking a OpenWapp here)
  • A few times I dropped calls, because the button to drop a call is so close to the edges of the screen.
  • Sometimes, the phone becomes slow, with no obvious reasons.
  • WebRTC was not yet supported on my firmware
  • Calling a contact involved two taps (first on the contact, then on ethe number you want to dial). This might sound picky, but is also annoying after some time.

At the bottom line Firefox OS was okay, but I am really missing a decent phone for it. The “complete package” is not right yet - A bit more polished and stronger phone might make the experience better.

For now I’m going with an Android budget phone, but I am ready to grab any new Firefox OS if it is a poiece of decent hardware,

::: {#footer} [ September 28th, 2015 11:10am ]{#timestamp} [firefoxos]{.tag} [alcatel]{.tag} [fire]{.tag} [fedora]{.tag} :::