Firefox OS phone ... first observations
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:date: 2013-05-24T15:26:02
:category: computer
:tags: firefoxOS, review

Yes, even I’ve got my Geeksphone Peak, and yes I like it. I am sure,
that I have collectible item in my hands … it will be either that
historical model which changed the world to the open standards on
mobile, or maybe it will be in one of those `“10 biggest flops”`_
articles (yes, I would love to have Lisa!). I am not sure about this
mass success, but I feel like I may eventually like it for myself (which
is actually all I care for; after all, I am a happy user of Linux). The
first news is very good news: it works perfectly as a phone, which means
I use it as my day to day phone (well, music player doesn't switch off
on picking up the phone). Also, camera Just Works™, it is possible even
lightly edit the image on the phone (a feat which the standard Android
camera was not able to accomplish, BTW). Now the problematic parts.

Calendar just doesn't work for me. It works with CalDAV on Firefox OS
Simulator 3.0, but not `with my phone`_. Sad but expected (I don’t know
why Calendars get so bad treatment by most software providers, not
mentioning missing Tasks). Also, originally, Mail `didn’t work for me`_,
but I was able to get it working more or less with some later images
from Geeksphone (still from time to time the app doesn't load the body
of the mail ever). Which leads to another problem: there are no OTA
updates yet. I am willing to use Debian/unstable or Fedora/Rawhide, but
I really need to be sure, that all those bugs which I hit will be soon
fixed and delivered to me. Getting developing-quality with no updates,
is really a bad experience for the user, I would say. In the end I at
least found `the latest images from Geeksphone`_, but that still has
only 1.0.1 version, although there are rumours of 1.1 already existing
on the Mozilla servers. Other bad experience is that fonts are tiny,
almost unreadable, and I haven’t a way (even a one which would include
adb or something similarly drastic) to work around it.

The worst and the best part of the phone is the situation with Contacts.
Out of the box, FF OS imports just from SIM card (who still uses
contacts there?) and from Facebook (I don’t have an account, and even if
I had I would never ever store my main address book there). That was
pretty bad, as I really didn't look forward typing of couple hundred
contacts I had on pretty crappy keyboard (with unreadably small
characters). So, my programmer’s pride raised its head, and I have wrote
`Javascript LDIF parser`_ and with that I was able to write `a simple
(and ugly) single-webapp for importing a LDIF file to the system address
book`_. While doing that I have found that there is already `Importer
from GMail Contacts`_. I don’t use GMail, so it wasn’t useful for me as
such, but eventually I hope to merge my code into this app, because it
has much better user interface.

Generally I am enjoying the ride so far, and I am looking to the time
where I could get my fix of nightlies everyday.

.. _`“10 biggest flops”`:
    http://www.maclife.com/article/top_10_apple_flops
.. _`with my phone`:
    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=874946
.. _`didn’t work for me`:
    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=869711
.. _`the latest images from Geeksphone`:
    http://downloads.geeksphone.com/peak/estable/latest_stable.html
.. _`Javascript LDIF parser`:
    https://git.cepl.eu/cgit/firefoxOS/parseLDIF/
.. _`a simple (and ugly) single-webapp for importing a LDIF file to the system address book`:
    https://git.cepl.eu/cgit/firefoxOS/importLDIF/
.. _`Importer from GMail Contacts`:
    https://github.com/arcturus/firefoxos-contacts-importer