Wasn't Kai the name of the undead assassin in Lexx? Basically, already dead, didn't stop moving.
The phone OS that muggers wouldn't touch is back from the dead
Dead phone platforms are coming back to life at MWC in 2018 – like a zombie feature phone apocalypse. Firefox OS was the talk of Mobile World Congress five years ago as the wealthy Californian nonprofit announced an ambitious licensing initiative... and a $25 handset. I will admit I was scathing. "It's the sort of phone left …
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Monday 26th February 2018 18:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Lexx..
TRT,
Surely, it needs to be the full chorus :) :)
Yo A O, Hom Var Ray,
Yo A Ra, Jerhume Brunnen G
Way Ro Way, Ro Hanna Ro,
A Way Ro Ra, Jay Hanna Ray
Yo A O, Hom Var Ray,
Yo A Ra, Jerhume Brunnen G
Yo A O, Hom Var Ray,
Yo A Ra, Jerhume Brunnen G
Yo A O, Hom Var Ray,
Yo A Ra, Jerhume Brunnen G
Yo A Ra, Jerhume Brunnen G
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Monday 26th February 2018 17:43 GMT Sgt_Oddball
Re: Ring Ring Ring Ring Ring Ring Ring
That's actually about the same colour as my first ever phone back in days of 'people's phone' and 50p a minute calls ontop of the contract. It also weighed more than any other phone ove ever had but this was in the early 2g days... I wonder if my parents still have it?
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Monday 26th February 2018 12:17 GMT Steve Davies 3
If you really want to stand out in the crowd
then get one of these bright yellow phones.
I dare not think what people will think of you when you pull one out (of wherever you keep your phone and hopefully not next to that 'other' banana).
Paris because it is clearly not 'blingy' enough for her.
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Monday 26th February 2018 20:16 GMT David Given
I used to program for Symbian. I sincerely hope that it's not just dead, but buried at a crossroads with a stake through the twisted nugget of hate that passed for a heart.
In fact... hand me that shovel, will you? I think I need to go dig it up, just so I can bury it again. Just to be sure.
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Tuesday 27th February 2018 17:40 GMT Cuddles
Re: Battery life
"Doubt it, the limiting factor there will be the radio and the not the CPU."
Indeed. There's a reason this phone boasts about a 17 day standby battery life, but can only manage a decidedly average 9 hours talk time. Feature phones are great at lasting a long time because most of the time they're not really doing anything to use the battery. The 4G and wifi chips will be basically the same as in any other phone, but here are only attached to a 150mAh battery, so try hammering them and it will probably end up much worse off than a regular smartphone.
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Monday 26th February 2018 16:41 GMT Teiwaz
I'd have liked the option of horrific green. That's my normal go to colour for devices I need help not to forget
A nice luminous dayglow green - even if it only glows when it's ringing - you'd not only never forget, you'd easily find it - we could call it the 'Orville'
That was the problem with the Lumia line, they didn't.
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Monday 26th February 2018 14:15 GMT StripeyMiata
I had a FireFox OS phone that a mugger probably would have wanted
I used to own a LG Fx0 - https://gadgets.ndtv.com/lg-fx0-2233
It was see-through gold and one of the only few phones in the last few years I have owned that had people regularly ask "what is that". The other one is a Amazon Fire Phone.
The phone was lovely, but FireFox back then even though I was on 2.2 still felt slow and buggy. Ironically the Firefox browser itself was one of the worse things about it.
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Monday 26th February 2018 14:35 GMT Hairy Weasel
90% there...
"It can run over two weeks on a single charge. It can do Outlook push email and Gmail, and Google Maps. And Facebook and Twitter. And VoLTE calls and run – presumably for ages – as a mobile hotspot. That's as much modern phone as a lot of people need."
90% there. Banking and public transport apps are the two major ones missing. Maybe when banks and public transport switch away from apps towards PWA? Or would this OS not support those?
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Monday 26th February 2018 14:44 GMT tiggity
Re: 90% there...
Would do the job for some older relatives of mine, all they need on a phone is calls, text, email (gmail specifically) and a browser as that's all they mainly* use on their androids, despite gazillions of apps being available.
* Only other app I am aware of any of them ever using is mapping, and they all have car satnavs so they only used phone maps to walk to a location in unfamiliar town / city & that's rare use case for them.
So they (and I assume plenty of other older folk) ideal target for Feature Phone "Plus" - OK for people who don't need many "extras" but have not quite hit the fine motor control issues of only being able to use a Doro style phone
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Thursday 1st March 2018 17:31 GMT Radio Wales
Re: 90% there...
You miss the point of your elderly relative 's dilemma
I wanted a 'smarter' phone for some basic needs without having to cough up for stuff I didn't need so purchased a lightweight Samsung.
Trouble was, it had so much bundled crapware there wasn't any room for more than two or three apps that I wanted. It was always 'Out of memory' despite having a 16Gb SD in it.
Eventually went in the drawer along with the previous cutting edge Nokia phones I'd had that in the end, didn't actually do anything useful.
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Monday 26th February 2018 14:50 GMT Shadow Systems
Dear Mister Simon Sharwood...
Amazingly feature phones continue to outsell smartphones in Asia. Strategy Analytics estimated almost 400 million were sold in 2017 worldwide. Nokia moved over 13 million feature phones in its most recent quarter, and given its historical leadership, you would think this was worth a further punt.
Would you like to appollogize for that "evolutionary dead end" comment from the other day, or would you rather choke on the taste of crow?
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Monday 26th February 2018 16:11 GMT BinkyTheMagicPaperclip
Android was fine in 512MB..
I had an Xperia Pro up until a few years ago, it worked fine up to Jelly Bean, and Gingerbread that it shipped with was very fast. Kitkat coincided with app bloat, and it became too slow to realistically use multiple apps at the same time. Facebook was a major culprit in hogging resource, unsurprisingly.
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Monday 26th February 2018 16:37 GMT Barry Rueger
Leave Android? YES!
With every iteration Android (like most Google products) becomes less useful and more encumbered with stuff I neither need nor want. And let's face it, 98% of apps are less than useful.
Once you've got email, text messaging, maps, and a browser I'm pretty much covered. Not being tied into the stifling Google omniverse is very appealing, as is "less is more."
My preference for Linux is rested firmly on my ability to have only what I want and need on a computer, and I would love that my phone, which many days is my primary computing device, could be the same.
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Monday 26th February 2018 17:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
Sailfish
I have been using a Sailfish device. The hardware is vastly underpowered, but the phone is actually quite responsive. I have been quite impressed with it. Only thing you notice is when you run an app using the Android Compatibility (because there is no native app available) is that those Android apps are horribly slow.
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Monday 26th February 2018 18:24 GMT EveryTime
For years I carried a flip phone and a WiFi-only smartphone (no plan).
It was a great combination, mainly due to the flip phone. I could call a friend or redial in about two seconds. The phone was dropped and scratched many times, with only cosmetic damage. A charge could last most of a week. It cost so little as an add-on to a family plan that I never was quite sure which family member was paying for it that year.
Then one day I lost the flip phone (between the car seat and tunnel, it turned out). I activated the smart phone. Now I'm paying far more, carrying a power bank/wall brick/cable everywhere, and always fiddling with something. I can't count on my phone doing simple things, such being an alarm clock, because the battery may have died from unexpected use or weak signal. And some forced-install carrier app is always turning itself on and spamming me.
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Monday 26th February 2018 18:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Avoid Alcatel at all costs
Alcatel recently pushed an "important security update" on to users devices which weaponized the factory installed system apps.
The system apps are now streaming advertisements with audio from Shanghai TenCent and scanning the users WIFI and Bluetooth connections.
Users on XDA Developers site are livid and vowing to never purchase another Alcatel device.
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Tuesday 27th February 2018 14:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Avoid Alcatel at all costs
Have you got any more background on that?
I have an Alcatel tablet (which like all present-day Alcatel consumer tat is actually the "Alcatel" brand being used under license by TCL). But I haven't come across anything like that yet.
Edit; mentions of the "Idol" line here, but not the Pixi I own. At any rate, I'll be avoiding buying another Alcatel if this is the case.
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Monday 26th February 2018 21:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
That KaiOS thing
Is that open source / free software? Their FAQ seems less than straightforward about it:
> we’ll make the source code available to the extent required by the applicable open source licenses. [my emphasis]
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Tuesday 27th February 2018 02:39 GMT aberglas
Javascript will kill it
The idea of a simple, cheap phone is appealing, and 500K should be more than enough for a phone and a bit of browsing. But sadly, the latter is not what it used to be.
Browsing modern web pages means executing ever larger globs of JavaScript, that, even when "compiled", requires a lot of grunt to operate. And all the features of HTML5 aint going to fit in any small device anyway.
So yes, it would be possible to build a simple, cheap, low powered device. But it won't support modern JavaScript websites. So will be useless in practice.
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Tuesday 27th February 2018 08:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Javascript will kill it
Absolutely. The average size of a webpage is way over 1MB now... I used to craft websites with tiny code in 1993, well optimised graphics, html compressed, and I'm just amazed at how huge single page views have become. You couldn't even look up your train times with one of these, not quickly anyway, unless the CPU was very fast, which I doubt very much. Maybe all mobile device browsers should come with a "Request Low Memory Usage, Non Overstuffed With Crap Designed To Leak My Data And Make Every Website Look Exactly The Same Except For The Colour Of The Big Stupid Looking Buttons - Site", just below "Request Desktop Site".
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Tuesday 27th February 2018 18:59 GMT detritus
Re: Javascript will kill it
I noticed that a client's website was loading slowly so downloaded it and ... oh my God, 52Mb!
Mostly over-sized images, of course, but because it was on a well-known Website-Maker, it also featured 2Mb of Javascript that did... who knows. The class definitions for the body tag alone weighed 8Kb.
It's like no one gives a shit any more.
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Tuesday 27th February 2018 11:02 GMT James Hughes 1
Re: "complexity and notification overload of the modern Android experience"
@DougS The problem is that Android is a sprawling mess of millions of lines of code. Stripping out 'unnecessary' stuff is a horrendous job, and there is still no guarantee it will be any more reliable than something written from scratch (albeit based over the Linux kernel which handles all the complex stuff).
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Tuesday 27th February 2018 21:31 GMT SamX
After the introduction of JIO, the new mobile 4G-only VoLTE network in India launched by the country's richest man, 4G feature phones gained popularity suddenly. They offer unlimited data (1GB per day at full 4G speed, reduced to slow Kbps speeds after) and unlimited calls for ~£5 per month.