townx

Exit Galaxy S2

I had a Galaxy S2 for a couple of years, which was a brilliant phone. It's Android, so you are spoilt for choice as far as apps go: my main use of the device was for multimedia, watching Netflix, iPlayer, stuff on my NAS drive (via BubbleUPnp, the best Android UPnP client, by the way), Sky Go (it's one of a handful of compatible devices), listening to music and radio shows. Using the excellent SwiftKey virtual keyboard, typing was fast and easy, so I also used it for personal email, Twitter, Facebook etc. The camera was great; so good that I'd stopped using our digital camera in favour of the S2.

But problems started a few months back. The microSD card somehow got corrupted, so I lost a load of photos. The USB port (or the system's detection of it) got flaky, so sometimes it continued to behave as if it was charging, even when unplugged. I couldn't reliably connect the USB to download files from it. I couldn't update the operating system, so more and more apps were becoming incompatible.

Enter ZTE Open

Eventually I realised I was going to need a new phone, contract-free (I use giffgaff). Because I like a challenge, and I work in open source, and some of my friends and old colleagues work on it, and because it uses HTML5 for its whole UI, I went for a SIM-free ZTE Open running Firefox OS (£60 on eBay).

On paper, Firefox OS sounds like a great concept: fully open source, most of the userland apps in HTML5, extensive web APIs for third party developers to interact with system services. However, my disappointment on first trying the phone was almost palpable. In fact, my first impressions were so very bad that I contemplated selling it on eBay within about an hour of unwrapping it. I was going to write a thorough review explaining why, but then this Phones Show video summed it up. As a phone, this device is barely adequate, for all the reasons explained there. I'll summarise the salient points:

• The capacitive screen is so unresponsive, it feels like a resistive screen.
• The camera has no flash and is only 3 mega-pixels. I could have worked this out beforehand, but it never occurred to me that a phone would be sold without a flash in 2013.
• The onscreen keyboard is unpredictable, fiddly and generally a very poor experience. I end up having to correct mistakes so often that I've practically given up using it for anything other than text messaging. Even then, the experience is about as good as typing on hardware keys 10 years ago (remember that?).
• The user experience when using some of the applications is just dreadful. For example, if you use the Twitter app to follow a link, the link opens in a browser and the Twitter app disappears (closes itself, I'm guessing). You end up having to restart the Twitter app and scroll back to the place you'd got to in the status updates list.
• The app-store is full of hobby projects or very thin wrappers around mobile websites. The quality is generally quite poor.
• Some mobile sites don't recognise the phone, or think it's Android, or are so slow they're unusable. So iPlayer, Amazon Cloud Reader (there's no Kindle app), and Evernote are inaccessible. I'm guessing there are lots more. Other sites like GMail look like they did 5 years ago, as you get the default "we're not really sure which phone you're using" interface.
• Because there's no widgets API as far as I can tell, you can't easily shortcut to tasks you might need to do often (e.g. change screen brightness: to do this, you have to dig into the configuration app, which takes a click, a scroll, another click, and a slide; I can't bear auto-brightness, as the screen brightness fluctuates madly in the British weather).
• Setting up the email app for an IMAP server took me forever, until I realised that it was because the SSL certificate the email server was using was registered to a different domain name. Once I ping'ed the IP address and got the "real" domain name, and used that instead of the alias, it worked. I've never had this issue with any other email app, on Android or Linux or Windows or Mac, which will either carry on regardless or give you a decent error message about why they're hesistating. No normal user is going to know how to sort this out (though admittedly they'll probably be using GMail or Yahoo).
• Setting up the weather app to show me the weather for where I live, automatically when I open it, took forever. I ended up going to the mobile site (instead of using the Accuweather app, which couldn't seem to remember my location), finding the weather for where I live, and bookmarking that instead. And of course there's no widget (see above) so you can see it at a glance.
• The contacts app has no integration with Google contacts, only Facebook. It can import contacts from a SIM, though in my case they are a complete mess as I was maintaining contacts in Google contacts.
• Updates failed for me for about a week. I kept getting a notification that there was an update, and when I tried to download it, I got a generic "update failed" message.
• The web API has some big gaps which prevent you from writing certain types of apps (e.g. anything using udp). This is a bit developer-specific, but it puts a leash on how useful the phone is even to developers.

Within a few days of purchasing it, I realised it just wasn't going to do for general day-to-day use. I actually forked out for a very cheap (£50) Android (Jelly Bean) tablet from Amazon (I think I should have spent a bit more money, as the web browsing on it is a bit crap, but games and multimedia work fine; the screen is only adequate; and the system clock drifts incessantly, which is irritating).

Having said all this, the good points of the ZTE Open are:

• It was dirt cheap.
• The phonecall and text functionality are acceptable (I am using it as my everyday phone).
• It integrates with Google calendars.
• It is light and compact.
• The battery life is excellent (though probably because I don't use it much).
• I like the data usage monitoring (useful if you're on a capped-broadband or pay-as-you-go SIM).
• Wireless works fine. I haven't had any issues with it on my wifi, unlike the chap in that video review. Though it does randomly drop off wifi occasionally.
• Firefox is a decent mobile browser.
• It is an incredible achievement to put together an operating system for a mobile device and get it to market. I have only admiration for the team that managed it.

It's also worth bearing in mind the context for the device. It's not a "first world smart phone", more a "developing markets first smart phone". In that context, it's great. I imagine even having internet access on a phone would be a massive boon in some countries (I remember how exciting it was when I got my first hand-me-down HTC phone a few years ago). Data usage monitoring is key in countries where phone companies are still developing infrastructure, and contracts are likely to be capped.

Marconi

And, this isn't the end of the story from my point of view. Once I got over the initial disappointment of how incomplete, inadequate and substandard this device is as a phone, and ordered an Android tablet to take up the slack, the "pressure" was off the ZTE Open. I could lower my expectations because I didn't need it to be anything more than a phone. Any functionality on top of that was a bonus. With this new (more realistic) perspective, I could more easily see the possibilities. Here was a phone which I could develop apps for, using my existing skills and toolchain, without having to run cumbersome SDKs and emulators (I have tried Android development in the past, but it's not really my thing).

Recently, I've been downloading radio shows and podcasts, and listening to them while walking around, after dropping the kids off at school, picking them up, shopping etc. Firefox OS has a music player, which is OK though basic. But this app, like most other music apps, is focused on playing music: generally short pieces of audio that you might listen to in one sitting, from start to finish. By contrast, listening to radio shows is more like watching a film on Netflix or reading a book on a Kindle: you might listen to the first half hour, then switch it off, then go back to it later.

Most music apps don't cope with this use case, where you "pick up" an audio file for a while then set it down, so you can come back later. The main feature you need for this is to track progress through an audio file and persist it, so a user can return to the same point they reached earlier. (The way Netflix and Kindle do for movies and books respectively.) On top of this, I also wanted a music player that showed me the full title and album for a track without truncating it or scrolling it leisurely into view; group by album as the default (as the album for a podcast or radio series tends to be the important thing, rather than the artist). Other desirables features: a slider for scrubbing through a track, while being able to see where you are in it (the Firefox OS Music app isn't great for this); and skip buttons to jump over chunks at the start of an audio file (where they tend to put introductions and adverts). I also wanted standard music app features, like being able to quickly go back to the last thing I listened to. And I didn't want loads of other features that I rarely use or care about, like playlists and album cover art.

I started a project called Marconi, an audio player focused on audio rather than music. My first step was ripping some code out of the Firefox OS Music app for decoding the ID3 tags out of mp3 files (the beauty of open source, though it would be nice if audio tag reading was a service...). I then wrote a wrapper round the Firefox OS deviceStorage API, so I could read audio files from the phone's hard drive and get their metadata. Initially, I just had a very simple list view of the files as an HTML file.

Next, for testing, I installed and setup adb (Android Debug Bridge) and the Firefox OS simulator (as documented on the Mozilla developer network). Shortly, I got Marconi running in the simulator (once I'd recognised this bug was holding me up).

After that, it took me a while to figure out the steps I needed to be able to push stuff to the phone. For those of you who might be similarly struggling (it was the main barrier for me), on Fedora Linux the steps are:

• Unplug your Firefox OS phone from your development machine.
• On your development machine, close Firefox.
• On your development machine, you need a rule so that udev will recognise your phone when plugged in via USB (at least, I think you do; I get so confused sometimes). Add a file /etc/udev/rules.d/60-fxos (owned by root:root, chmod 644) with this content:
  
  SUBSYSTEM=="usb",ATTR{idVendor}=="19d2",MODE="0666",GROUP="plugdev"
• Restart udev, probably sudo udevadm control --reload-rules. It all gets a bit vague here, but I just checked and this seems to work.
• Kill any existing adb server instances.
• Start adb as root. AS ROOT. You can probably do it as non-root, but will have to fiddle about with all sorts of permissions. I spent a while on this before giving up and resorting to root.
• Run adb devices and ensure you see a line like "roamer2 device". If you get "Insufficient permissions", restart adb with your fingers crossed and/or a prayer on your lips and try again.
• On your Firefox phone: make sure you have remote debugging enabled (Settings > Device information > More information > Developer > tick "Remote debugging"); and turn USB mass storage off (Settings > Media storage > untick "USB mass storage" so it is disabled).
• Open Firefox, then the Firefox OS simulator.
• Plug the phone into your development machine. Hopefully it will show up in the simulator tab. You should now be able to push apps to it.

One other thing which wasn't very clear from the docs: you will need a manifest file, called something like manifest.webapp (the .webapp is important) to be able to load your app into the simulator. It's explained in detail on the Mozilla developer site.

I continued developing the app, which uses Bootstrap 3 for most of the UI (I'm not 100% sold on it, but it's quite lightweight and looks pretty good), jQuery UI for the slider (it's the best HTML5 slider in my opinion), some media player code I wrote on a previous project (which wraps HTML5 <audio>), localStorage to persist progress data, and Stapes for event handling and the model layer. There are a couple of screenshots below.

Notes: the screen on the left is scrolled up a bit so you can see the progress bars for two files; the buttons are positioned so I can reach them with a thumb when holding the phone with one hand; the slider updates the progress text at the top as you slide, and you can slide it to reach right to the start or end of a track - difficult to do precisely with the default Firefox OS Music app; progress bars on the home screen update in real time as you're listening to a track; the top-right notes button takes you back to the "last played"/"currently playing" track.

Finally, after quite a bit of work, I have an app which does what I want, for now. It won't scale to thousands of files, only copes with mp3s, doesn't do playlists or album art; but it is optimised for me: it remembers what I listened to last, it tracks my progress through audio files, it shows me full album and track titles, and it has BIG UI elements and fonts which I can easily see and press while I'm walking around. Yes, it's fairly ugly, the proportions are all wrong, it's not perfect by any means, but it suits me very nicely.

The moral of this story is that while Firefox OS is terrible as a end-user phone in 2013 (well, about as good as the phone I had 10 years ago), it is great as a platform for experimenting with HTML5 web apps in a real mobile environment. I don't think of my ZTE Open as a phone so much; more as a custom media player which I wrote myself, with the phone functionality as a bonus. Which is a rewarding feeling to have.