This is my subjective view on the Mozilla Firefox flame device
running Firefox OS 2.x nightlies. I've been using it as my main phone
device for maybe 3 months already and I think that's enough time so that
any critique is not caused by being used to other devices but real
indication of user experience.
First I have a nice impression from the design of the phone. It's really nice to hold it and look at it.
Also
I'm very impressed with the battery life. With lite usage it works for
me maybe 5 days long in the city with good network coverage.
It has a very sane user interface that I immediately got used to.
But here are the pain points I see.
Foremost
is the presence of only one button. Having used android before I would
say that I still often wish I had the back button and the menu/settings
button. Why lose the real estate of the device with putting only one
button and all this empty space around?
I see full screen apps
usually put a tiny arrow at the bottom of the screen but it is hard to
spot and hard to tap on with the touchscreen. Back button is often
missing in apps and it's hard to go back (one has to resort to the home
button and then navigate back to the desired place.
If somebody from mozilla cares, then please reconsider adding the other two buttons.
The
OS has a very nice feature - hold home button and you can select
applications and close them (unlike android where you can't close an
app). There is a lot of space on the screen but the X-button is so tiny
that I always have troubles tapping on it (maybe I should file a bug
report for that).
Another nifty feature is sliding from
one app to another. But this feature interferes with sliding feature of
app itself. For example when I try to view previous/next image in
galery app, I often change the app itself. IMO would be better to switch
apps only when sliding on particular location of the screen like the
top 1/3 or 1/4 part of the screen. Because in an app one would rarely
need to slide that high.
Another nice feature is holding
home button to see list of apps and have ability to close apps. Very
nice if the "x" was a little larger so I can easily tap on it.
Time...
very strange bu my phone often hangs. I reboot it but them time goes
totally wrong. I need to disable/reenable automatic time for it to be
resynced. Very confusing at times.
Contacts:
Not
sure why every time I try to sync contacts with google, I need to enter
password again and the two factor code. Sync is only one way also.
Renaming of contact is not detected and I end up with two contacts. Finding duplicates didn't catch that as well.
Also
too bad the contact app does not show anything within braces like John
(the good boy). I see only John in the list and I can't differentiate
between the Johns until I open the contact.
Another thing is that
app does not search through all fields in contacts. I often have Name
and phonetic name of contacts. It's too bad I have to search twice -
with native name and phonetic name to find a contact.
One other
contact deficiency is that it only downloads contacts from "my contact".
I used to have some other groups to select what I want inside the phone
but had to put all contacts under "My contacts" so they are synced to
the phone.
email:
lack of categories and
lack of ability to do anything with attachments whatsoever. Not with the
app and not by accessing gmail with browser. Actually accessing through
browser was mostly broken last time I've tried.
There's
some issue with charging battery over USB from a standby laptop. It
works with an android phone... I guess that might be a HW quirk.
Keyboard:
I'd only say rather inconvenient compared to android.
It
turned out into a rant but really Firefox OS needs a lot of polish
until it's a pleasure to work with. So far I'm still with it for the
foreseeable future.
