Firefox OS 1.3 Arrives: Dual SIM Support, Continuous Autofocus, Graphics Boost 68
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla today released Firefox OS version 1.3 to its partners for implementing in their smartphones. There are many new features for both users and developers, and the first phone to feature them is the ZTE Open C, which is available for sale as of today on eBay. First and foremost, Firefox OS users can expect dual-SIM dual-standby (DSDS) support, which gives you two lines on compatible phones, a popular feature in emerging markets. DSDS lets dual-SIM devices individually manage two different SIMs for calling, texting, or data through the 'SIM Manager' interface."
Dual SIm's Why? (Score:1, Interesting)
With Google Voice, skype, Takatone, and the like (not to mention call forwarding), you can already have multiple lines ring on the same single smartphone in your pocket.
Tired of crap "mobile" operating systems (Score:5, Interesting)
Today we have quad core multi-ghz CPUs with gigabytes of memory and 1080 displays. Having installed Linux from floppies on hardware orders of magnitude less capable is it now really too much to ask to have UI execute from a real non-nerf'd operating system?
Why can't I compile and run whatever software that will run on desktop on my phone?
Javascript: Massive energy inefficiency? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is an honest question. How does the overhead of having all apps written in Javascript affect battery life? There are tools to compile Android apps to native indtead of Dalvik, and the perormance boost is substantial. I’d expect that the performance comparison between Javascript and native would be orders of magnitude. Now, I realize that most of time, phones are either idle or asleep, but all that extra CPU time for every interactive event has got to add up.
Re:Javascript: Massive energy inefficiency? (Score:4, Interesting)
The real performance bottlenecks have to do with RAM, and just-in-time compilations (though that is often cached). Even number-crunching apps can use asm.js to approach native performance, and even if the gap isn't fully closed there just aren't many apps that require that much performance for a simple smartphone. If you wanted the best possible performance you'd be wasting much time, because it's not JS that's causing most of the performance issues on something like FirefoxOS, but simply the RAM usage and the graphics stack being a bit slipshod in places (though both aspects are being actively improved a lot in FirefoxOS).