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How KaiOS claimed the third-place mobile crown
In December 2015, Mozilla announced it would be abandoning Firefox OS as a smartphone platform. Many assumed the company's withdrawal would kill any hope of a mobile operating system built around the open web, rather than a combination of native apps and tightly-controlled storefronts. In the last few years, plenty of so-called "alternative" smartphone platforms, including Ubuntu Touch and Windows 10 Mobile, have faded into obscurity, too. Jolla has struggled on with Sailfish OS, but it's never felt like a true challenger to the Android and iOS duopoly. Three years later and a surprising competitor has emerged: KaiOS. The relative newcomer, which makes feature phones smarter, is already running on more than 80 million devices worldwide. How did it grow so big, so quickly? With a little help from Firefox OS.
[...] The operating system that emerged is quite different to Firefox OS. The user interface, for instance, is built around phones with physical keys and non-touch displays. The application icons are smaller and you'll often see a contextual strip at the bottom of the screen with physical input options such as "Cancel" and "Okay." KaiOS optimized the platform for low-end hardware -- it only requires 256MB of RAM to run -- and, crucially, kept support for modern connectivity such as 3G, 4G, WiFi, GPS and NFC.
Feature phones are normally associated with emerging markets such as India and Brazil. KaiOS, however, started in the US with the Alcatel-branded Go Flip. Codeville and his team persuaded AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile to stock the handset because of their proven track record while working at TCL. Those deals then allowed the company to win a contract with Jio, a mobile network in India owned by a massive conglomerate called Reliance Industries. Together they built the JioPhone, a candybar-style device with a 2.4-inch display and 512MB of RAM. It was effectively given away with ultra-competitive 4G plans.
[...] Google Assistant was a particularly important addition. For many, voice is a faster way of typing than pecking a classic one-through-nine keypad with their thumbs. The Assistant talks back, too, which makes the platform viable for people with poor literacy skills.
Previously: $25 Firefox OS Smartphone Coming to India
Mozilla Adding Granular App Permissions to Firefox OS
Geeksphone Stops Support for FirefoxOS with No Warning
Mozilla to Cease Development of Firefox OS
The Story of Firefox OS
Google Invests $22 Million in the OS Powering Nokia Feature Phones
(Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Wednesday February 27 2019, @08:05AM (1 child)
i got a nokia bananaphone last year.
So did I.
The keypad is dreadful because is is incredibly non-ergonomic.
KaiOs runs slowly.
It lacks applications and a non-locked down application store. I also can't delete unwanted apps, such as the games off mine.
The Human Interface design is poorly thought out, making extensive use of the 4-way button on the keypad when mapping the number keys (2,4,6,8 to Up Left Right Down*) would give better targets.
There is no volume control on the side of the phone. However, the on/off switch is placed, unprotected, on the side of the phone, which gets easily activated when in a pocket, turning the phone off.
I had hoped it would incorporate more of the good design elements of the original Nokia 8810. It manages to miss too many of them. I do not recommend the new version, despite the good technical specifications.
*A resistive touchscreen would be a cheap addition which would make the experience much better. The icons are laid out on the screen in a grid that positively invites selection via the screen, rather then a scrollable list. The Original Nokia 8810 allowed you to navigate through the menus using the keypad, so you could navigate to a particular menu item by memorising the number sequence - e.g. 1493 might take you to the Clock and 1494 to the Stopwatch, so you could bypass the scroll keys. I know it is meant to be a featurephone, not a full smartphone, which might be why a low input resolution mat over the screen hasn't been used, but the design overall is very poor.
(Score: 2) by moylan on Wednesday February 27 2019, @09:56AM
Even if you could push the unremoveable apps into a folder you could ignore it would be better.
the bottom row of buttons is awkward to reach as the slider gets in the way.
i didn't find the os slow myself. seemed reasonably nippy. but then i use bottom of the range android phones so maybe i'm used to slow.
so close to being a very good phone. let down by locked down os