Testing a $35 Firefox OS phone—how bad could it be?

Hey! You there! You've got it pretty good, you know that? While you're sitting there using your Internet-enabled device to read about some other Internet-enabled device, it's easy to forget that the majority of people doesn't have any access to the Internet at all. The "World Wide" Web is actually not that worldwide—only about one-third of the population is online. That's 4.8 billion people out there with no way to get to the Internet.

Bridging this digital divide will be one of the tech industry's biggest challenges—and growth opportunities—over the coming years. As all-encompassing as the Internet feels now, the user base has the potential to triple in size. So as of late, we've started to see Internet companies take an interest in getting more of the disconnected world online. Facebook launched Internet.org, and Google has a ton of projects that aim to provide Internet by fiber, balloon, and drone for example.

But these initiatives are all focused on merely bringing Internet access, not addressing the actual hardware necessary to display the Internet. Enter the Intex Cloud FX, a $35 (Rs 1,999) smartphone from India aimed precisely at this issue. The Cloud FX runs Firefox OS, Mozilla's home-grown OS. Firefox OS is entirely Web-powered, and, therefore, Gecko, Firefox's layout engine, runs just about everything on the device. Apps are built entirely from Web technologies. Think "Chrome OS"—but from Mozilla and on a smartphone.

Fair warning: we're going to talk frankly and honestly about the Cloud FX, and it's not going to be pretty. As we journey into the world of sub-$50 smartphones, leave all worries about performance, user experience, and any kind of pleasantness behind you. While $35 doesn't buy you a lot, perhaps we're past the stage of "does it work well?" The question for a device like Cloud FX may simply be: "Does it work at all?"

The Internet, as cheap as possible

Today's Internet is wildly skewed in favor of rich, English-speaking companies and users. Only five percent of the world's population speaks English as a first language, but 55 percent of webpages are in English.

The countries without Internet access are exclusively the poorer ones—the "developing world." That means our Internet device is going to need to be as cheap as possible so that people can actually afford it, and the cheapest Internet-enabled device we can make is the smartphone. Its small size and relatively lightweight OSes are both qualities that lead to a low bill of materials, provided you aren't trying to make it powerful enough to double as a game console.

Besides being the cheapest computer we can make, a smartphone is the perfect device for this environment. Its self-contained nature makes it easy to take along in a pocket. The battery is great when there's no power. Long-distance wireless Internet, like cellular data technologies, is much cheaper to deploy than laying cable. For many people in developing countries, the smartphone will be their first Internet device.

Internet users in 2012 as a percentage of a country's population.

Credit: Wikipedia

Cloud FX is one of many offerings aiming to serve India, which has a combination of a really high population—1.2 billion people, second only to China—and really low Internet penetration—only 12.6 percent. China's 1.3 billion people aren't as good a target as you would think, thanks to a relatively high Internet penetration rate of 42.3 percent and a government that really, really hates the idea of a free and open Internet.

The highest-profile, India-focused device initiative thus far has been Google's Android One, which gives Indian OEMs an easy way to build high-quality smartphones that end up costing around $100. That sounds dirt cheap, but consider that the average monthly wage in India is around $295, and you'll realize that's still not good enough for most people.

Google's goal of "high-quality" with Android One is the problem. When you have no Internet at all, 60FPS animations and the latest software aren't really your primary concern. You just want to get online, within budget, any way you can; any Internet is better than no Internet. Which is where the Cloud FX factors in.

The Intex Cloud FX—2007's technology, today

This costs less than a tank of gas.

Credit: Ron Amadeo

The $35 price tag should color every sentence you read about the device. Though it is so cheap that most flaws can be forgiven, we still feel it's our duty to point them out.

We're not dealing with a speed demon here. The spec sheet looks like it's about seven years old: a 3.5-inch 480×320 LCD, a 1GHz single-core Cortex A5 CPU, 128MB of RAM, 256MB of storage, and a 2MP camera. That's roughly equivalent to a first-gen iPhone from 2007, but today you can buy 14 Cloud FXes for the launch price ($500) of the first base-model iPhone.

Missing from the spec list are several items you'd expect to find in a modern smartphone. There's no front-facing camera, no notification LED, no camera flash, no LTE, no 3G, and no GPS. The only available geolocation is from your IP address, which will (at most) narrow your location to your current city or town.

With only a few MB of free space out of the box, users need a MicroSD card for media consumption or picture-taking. While you can store pictures on the internal memory, there really isn't any space.

The other really weird thing missing is any kind of battery backup for the time. If the phone loses power, the time and date gets reset, leaving it looking like an old VCR blinking "12:00." So much of the Internet runs over a secure connection now, and the proper time needs to be set on the device or else it will think everyone's certificates are expired and may deny secure connections. When the time gets reset, you can't connect to the Firefox OS marketplace and download an app, you can't pull your e-mail over POP or IMAP, and every secure webpage will throw up an error.

Sure, the time will sync down from the cell signal—if you have a cell signal. Remember, though, this is meant for developing countries where mobile coverage may still not be complete. (It's easy enough to find "no service" in the US.) The time won't sync over Wi-Fi, either. It's perfectly possible to hit a Web server and pull the correct time—most desktop OSes do that—but Firefox OS doesn't.

Design & Build Quality

Two words about the phone's build quality: "not good." $35 means we're using the cheapest materials available. If you look closely, the plastic on the front half of the device isn't even a uniform color, giving it a grainy appearance. The color Intex is aiming for is clearly a smooth "black," but look closely and you'll see it's really a spectrum of tiny plastic bits fused together.

The phone shell has a needlessly busy looking three-layer construction. Half of the side is made up of the grainy plastic, then there's a strip of glossy plastic and a wrap-around back panel with a diamond pattern in it. We would think the low price would lead to a simple design, but there's a lot going on here.

We've called phones "cheap feeling" before, but the Cloud FX takes things to a whole 'nother level. At almost 12mm thick, the Cloud FX is about 1.5 times the thickness of a high-end smartphone. The device is light and feels almost hollow for the size, which makes sense since a good portion of the case is actually filled with air. Internally there's a gap between the battery and the semi-flexible back panel, so the back of the phone is squishy. A significant air gap also exists between the touchscreen and the LCD.

The Cloud FX therefore puts off a vibe on par with those toy flip phones that dispense candy. The whole exterior feels more like a "parts bucket" than anything that was designed to impart positive feeling to the user. The shell does at least serve its primary purpose of holding the phone together, though. It doesn't squeak or creak, and other than the squishy back panel (which granted, is about half of the phone) the device feels sturdy.

On the Cloud FX, colors are more of a guideline.

The body is large for the 3.5-inch display, which means about 40 percent of the Cloud FX front is bezel. The 480×320 display reminds us of a first-generation LCD, as the only angle that results in a decent picture is a perfect 90 degree angle. Horizontal viewing angles are OK, but move a few degrees off-center vertically, and the screen starts to invert. At about 20 degrees off perpendicular, the screen inverts completely, looking like negative film.

It's often hard to tell what color something really is, since the colors change so easily, depending on the screen angle. It wasn't until after taking screenshots for this article and viewing them on a better LCD that we had a sense of what the software looked like. The poor vertical viewing angles get even weirder in landscape mode, where the screen has a strange "shimmery" appearance, and you can never get the left side of the screen to look the same as the right side. Trying to play a game in landscape mode actually gave us a bit of a headache, since any small movement would change the colors.

A close up of the LCD. It's a normal RGB stripe.

We're pretty sure the front touchscreen is just a hard plastic. High-end smartphones bond the LCD to the front touchscreen, which gives a brighter picture and better viewing angles. The Cloud FX has no such luxuries, though, and the large gap between the LCD and front glass probably contributes to the poor image quality.

Besides the screen, the front of the device houses a single capacitive home button and the earpiece. The lack of a back button on Firefox OS might seem like a strange choice, but most Firefox OS "apps" aren't complex enough to need a permanent back button. The ones that do—like the settings—just throw a back button on the screen somewhere.

The back case has a diamond pattern cut into the back of it, almost exactly like the knurling you would find on a set of dumbbells or on a hand tool. It's rather industrial but also nice and grippy. The back includes a 2MP camera, a few logos, and the speaker. If you give the rear speaker some room to breathe, you'll find it's often louder than what you get on a high-end smartphone. However, it's much more distorted; Intex was clearly just aiming for max loudness here with no regard for sound quality.

The back pops off, revealing the meager 1250mAh battery. Under the battery you'll find a MicroSD slot and two SIM slots, a popular feature in India that allows a user to use two carriers simultaneously.

Firefox OS

The Firefox OS underpinnings are a lot like Chrome OS—a browser stretched out into a full operating system. All the apps are built using Web technologies, and everything is being rendered with Gecko, Firefox's layout engine. Despite the Cloud FX only being a month old, it's running an old version of Firefox OS (version 1.3). According to Mozilla's website, Firefox OS 1.3 actually hit end-of-life about two weeks after the Cloud FX was released.

In theory, Firefox OS can multitask, but thanks to a combination of failings in Firefox OS and in the hardware, you'll never have an app run in the background on the Cloud FX. The first problem is the Cloud FX's criminally low amount of RAM. 128MB of memory offers barely enough to run the current program, let alone the current program plus background tasks. The other problem is that when Firefox OS does run out of memory, it closes apps without doing anything to preserve their state or to keep critical background tasks running.

If the lock screen pops up while reading a webpage, you'll need to reload the page again. If you start the stopwatch and leave the app, the stopwatch stops. You can set the e-mail app to check for mail every five minutes, but there is never any free memory, so the mail check never runs. There isn't even anything to keep the crucial alarm process alive. If the phone is busy when an alarm is supposed to go off, it just doesn't go off. An alarm you can't trust to work 100 percent of the time is useless.

The interface is pretty standard for a smartphone. There's a lock screen, a horizontally scrolling home screen, and a pull-down notification panel. The home screen is iOS style—there's no app drawer; all the installed apps have to sit somewhere on the home screen. You get all the basic apps you would expect: an app store, clock, music, e-mail, calendar, gallery, camera, phone, contacts, and texting.

Mozilla runs an app store called the "Marketplace," where you can do all the usual app store stuff, and it is even browsable online. App compatibility stretches across Firefox OS and Firefox on the desktop, which means a lot of stuff in the app store won't run on the Cloud FX because it's too slow.

There are two kinds of Firefox OS "apps": local apps and bookmarks. Firefox OS really makes no distinction between the two, leaving it up to the user to figure out what will work offline and what won't. Most of the core smartphone apps you would expect are local apps, which are usable offline (contacts, clock, calendar, etc.), yet many of the "pre-loaded" games that should be local apps are actually just bookmarks to webpages. Solitaire, for instance, is "pre-loaded" in that there is an icon that ships with the OS, but it's just a Web app that needs an Internet connection.

You won't find much in the way of apps for Firefox OS. There's basically nothing "custom made" other than a small handful of utilities. Most "apps" in the Marketplace are just bookmarks that users could make themselves.

The real deal-breaker: typing

We could forgive just about every flaw with the Cloud FX if only one of the most important tasks worked well: typing. Typing on the Cloud FX is pure agony, and this is one of those really crippling deal breakers that makes the Cloud FX a bad phone at any price. The keyboard doesn't support multitouch, so you if press "Q" and "P" at the same time it splits the difference between the touch points and enters "Y." This means you can only ever carefully hunt and peck at a slow rate. It's very easy for the Cloud FX to slow down, so if anything is going on while you're trying to type, buttons will take a few moments to register. There's also no auto correction and no copy/paste.

You can't overstate how limiting a bad keyboard is. A cheap, slow, limited phone with an ugly screen would be fine for $35 if you could just type on it quickly and accurately, but, when you can't type, so many other use cases for the phone are ruined. The awful typing experience means you never want to create a document, take notes, send text messages, write e-mail, post on social media, shop online, search, enter a URL, or make calendar appointments. It all takes much longer than it should because you are constantly correcting errors and retyping things.

Performance

If you haven't guessed from the keyboard video above, the Cloud FX is slow. We'd love to run some benchmarks but, sadly, a combination of incompatibility and crashtastic software means nothing works. Our battery test doesn't run, nor will our usual benchmarks like Geekbench and GFXBench. You would think Firefox OS would have a killer browser that could easily run browser-based benchmarks, but they all crash. Even Mozilla's own Kraken benchmark doesn't run on the Cloud FX. This is probably due, again, to a lack of memory, since the tests all run fine on the ZTE Open C.

Ars Technica, as rendered three different times by the Cloud FX. It's "finished" loading.

Lacking any kind of real benchmark, our initial plan was to sit down with a stopwatch and record website load times, but the Cloud FX performance is so wildly inconsistent that we couldn't even get an average load time for the same site. Load times would frequently swing 1000 percent on the same website, regardless of the state of the browser cache. Ars would load in a few seconds one time and the next would take over a minute. The whole OS is like this; sometimes folders open to a blank screen, show a loading spinner, and never populate.

The performance isn't just inconsistent; rendering is too. Firefox OS seems to cut loading short sometimes, and the above screenshots show three attempts at the Ars homepage, all of which are "finished" loading. The first one is missing images and CSS, the second is a little further along but still unrecognizable, and the third is mostly loaded but missing lots of images. In general, Firefox OS is full of bugs like this, where things just stop working and need a reboot.

Most third-party apps need to download and render, too. Having to constantly make round trips to the Internet to pull down data means you'll be staring at a lot of loading spinners. Just something like opening Solitaire takes 10 seconds (we timed it), because the phone has to open the Solitaire window, load a browser instance, go out to the Internet, download all the Solitaire assets, and render everything. If you leave the app, even just for a second, you lose all your progress. You'll have to spend another 10 seconds downloading and rendering it again.

Navigating webpages is a nightmare. The problem isn't just that the phone is slow, it's that scrolling is nearly impossible. A lot of times the phone is busy, and scrolling doesn't do anything. When it does scroll, you'll find the rest of the page often isn't loaded and you'll get a gray screen that takes a few seconds to be loaded into memory. The other problem is that scrolling is often interpreted as pressing on a link. This, combined with the speed of the device and the often-frozen scrolling, means the Cloud FX is frequently doing things you don't want—and doing them very slowly.

The performance of the Cloud FX really cannot be understated. Screen taps sometimes take seconds to register. Firefox OS has a recent apps screen, but there is never any free memory, so nothing other than the current app is ever open. During particularly slow freak-outs, the screen will just turn black. If the phone falls asleep, or the alarm pops up, or a phone call comes in, your app closes and you lose your progress. Even something as simple as opening a folder of apps has a load time measured in seconds.

If Firefox OS was a little more considerate of the ultra-low-end specs of the Cloud FX, things wouldn't be so bad. A big part of the problem is merely that the OS clearly isn't targeted for something this slow. Being able to disable images and JavaScript in the browser would be a great first step, but Firefox OS offers no way to do that. We couldn't find an app or alternative browser, either. Android deals with low memory by saving the state of an app if it is going to be closed due to low memory, but Firefox doesn't appear to have any such abilities. Users will frequently lose data if they try to bounce from app to app.

The "camera," if you can call it that

The Cloud FX has a 2MP rear camera that feels like it's pushing the definition of what can be legally called a "camera." The output from the Cloud FX is more like a vague recollection of the colors and, if you're lucky, a shape or two. Every image we captured looked like a washed-out, muddy watercolor painting, and that's if we could see the image at all. The Cloud FX needs a lot of light to work. Moderately lit scenes were frequently turned into pitch-black nothingness.

We've got some samples so you can see just how bad it is. First our collection of cameras:

• The 2MP Intex Cloud FX, again, it's $35.
• The 3.15MP ZTE Open C, another Firefox OS phone, but this one costs $100.
• The 3.15MP T-Mobile G1, AKA the first Android phone ever, from 2008.
• The 8MP Nexus 5, so you can actually see what we're taking a picture of.
• The 8MP iPhone 5s, as an ideal smartphone image.

A picture of the Cloud FX instruction manual. We were hoping we could read the text afterward. That's a real quarter there for scale.

We have a hard time believing anyone would want to use this camera for fun, so the last picture is an attempt at trying to get some work done and make a copy of a document. The camera can't do that either, and the text is unreadable.

This really is the best the camera can do. The lens is clean, and we aren't moving and making the picture blurry. Look at the quarter in the picture above. The outline is actually pretty crisp; there's just no detail.

Cheap would be fine, but the software isn't right for the hardware

The Cloud FX whiffs on a lot of the basics. It's slow—too slow for Firefox OS. Scrolling on a webpage doesn't really work. It can't keep time without a data connection. The alarm isn't reliable. Background e-mail checks never run. Typing is an exercise in frustration, which limits what you're willing to do with the device. There isn't much left here to salvage.

Sure, we're spoiled, "rich" people compared to the target market, but it's hard to believe that this is a "best attempt" at a cheap smartphone. Computers have run on only a few KB of RAM before; don't tell us 128MB isn't enough for a decently performing machine.

The problem is that Firefox OS just isn't the right choice of operating system for this device—it's trying to do way too much with the limited hardware. It isn't configurable enough. Early versions of Android and iOS certainly ran better on similarly specced devices in the past. Sure, maybe the Cloud FX is too slow to load a modern webpage with all the bells and whistles, but who says we need all the bells and whistles? A way to turn off JavaScript and/or images in the browser would immensely help the Cloud FX, but Firefox OS has no such option. Heck, if you want to be truly minimal, why not a text-only browser like Lynx? But Firefox OS has no alternative browsers that we could find.

The browser isn't the only problem. If you were going to pick an OS for a device like this, you would want all sorts of low-memory considerations that Firefox OS doesn't have. Virtual memory would probably be a good idea. When the OS has to kill an app due to low memory, it should save the app's state and data. Critical background processes for things like the alarm and e-mail should always be kept alive, even in a low-memory situation. When Firefox runs out of memory, it should do something other than crash. Since getting a solid Internet connection throughout India is probably harder than in some other places, a cloud-powered OS based on a Web browser probably isn't the best idea.

Getting devices out to the developing world will be a big focus for many OEMs, since the market is just so huge. There are billions of people out there that still need access to the Internet. We know we can't expect something so cheap to hold a candle to the high-end devices we normally review, but all we ask is that the device be executed well and that the decisions that went into the product make sense.

The Cloud FX doesn't make any sense, though, even at $35. It doesn't seem like anyone set out to choose the best software for this device, and that was really the crippling decision. Low-end smartphones need a low-end-appropriate operating system, and Firefox OS isn't up to that task. We get the feeling there are relatively good, sub-$50 devices out there—but this isn't one of them.

The Good

• Per-app privacy controls. Block an app from seeing your location, contacts, or a host of other things on your phone.
• It's cheap!
• No really, have you seen how cheap it is? It's $35. Off contract. That's like, really cheap.

The Bad

• The software—Firefox OS was a totally inappropriate choice of operating system for this hardware. There are literally zero considerations for the speed and memory of the Cloud FX, and most of the device's really serious problems come from running software on hardware that feels well below the minimum spec.
• The software (again).
• The keyboard—No multitouch, no auto correct, no copy/paste. Press "Q" and "P" at the same time and the keyboard registers "Y." This ruins e-mail, searching, texting, typing URLs, and lots of other stuff.
• The memory—The phone constantly runs out of memory and can't multitask. Critical background features like the alarm and checking e-mail don't work because the phone is always out of memory.
• The screen—The viewing angles are terrible, and in landscape the shimmery-ness of the display is headache-inducing.
• The storage—There isn't any.
• The modem—You get Edge data. No 3G. Don't even ask about 4G.
• The camera—Pictures look more like impressionist watercolor paintings rather than scene recreations.
• The build quality—Ultra-cheap, ultra-plasticky build quality.
• The performance—Performance is really inconsistent, but it ranges from moderately slow to I-think-I-need-to-reboot-this slow.
• It can't keep time. There's no battery backup for the time, so if the phone resets or runs out of battery, the time defaults to last century. This silently breaks all apps that use a secure connection.
• There's no GPS.
• Firefox crashes all the time.

The Ugly

• Anyone who had this as their first smartphone would swear off smartphones forever.