Mobile

Mozilla announced Firefox OS back in 2011 under the codename Boot2Gecko, and since then the project has gone from a concept to something you can actually run on your desktop. I’ve been following it closely and finally got around to setting it up on my Ubuntu machine. Here’s how. What is Firefox OS? Firefox OS is Mozilla’s attempt at building a mobile operating system entirely from web standards. There’s no Java, no native SDK, no proprietary frameworks. The entire user interface – called Gaia – is built in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The rendering engine underneath is Gecko, the same one that powers Firefox. And at the bottom, it runs on a Linux kernel. ...

There was a period, roughly 2004 to 2008, when phone manufacturers decided that phones could be fashion accessories. Not phones that looked like fashion accessories. Actual fashion accessories that happened to make phone calls. I collected a few of them, or at least got close enough to handle them, and I still think some of the best phones I’ve ever held had nothing to do with specs or benchmarks. Nokia 8800 Sirocco This was the one that started it for me. Stainless steel body, a sliding mechanism that felt like opening a luxury watch case, and a weight to it that told you it was built from something real. The Nokia 8800 Sirocco wasn’t trying to be a smartphone. It was trying to be a thing you pulled out of your pocket and knew, immediately, was expensive. It worked. ...